


Fantasies.

by orange_crushed



Series: In the forests of the night. [2]
Category: Karppi | Deadwind (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Gore, Character Turned Into Vampire, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Murder Mystery, Nesting, References to Addiction, References to Depression, References to Medical Experimentation, Romance, Starting Over, Suicidal Thoughts, True Love, Vampires, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:48:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 51,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26190661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: "It's normal for this part to be a pain in the ass,” she says."Ah," he says. He ducks his head, presses a slow kiss to her cheek. Karppi squeezes him a little through his jeans. "Then we're doing it right."
Relationships: Sofia Karppi/Sakari Nurmi
Series: In the forests of the night. [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1901992
Comments: 32
Kudos: 59





	1. Chapter 1

He doesn't have a next of kin, not really: his mother was an only child and his father stopped speaking to his only brother long before Sakari was born. There are cousins somewhere but he's never bothered to look them up and they've returned the favor. The appropriate time for the rest of his family to sweep in and claim him passed about twenty years ago. Still, he knows that in cases of inheritance, people who wouldn't even recognize the deceased will sometimes crawl over broken glass to come out of the woodwork and claim their share. 

Thankfully, he doesn't have to worry about that.

“Excuse me,” says Karppi, on the phone in the bedroom. “Beneficiary?”

She's busy pacing a hole between the closet and the window; from his angle she's just a shadow moving across the floor of the hall. He can't see her but he's pretty sure she's biting her nails. "Me? How… when did… yes, I understand." He stops pretending to read his book in the living room and listens. His senses are keen enough now to catch the fuzzy voice on the other end of the call, but not quite keen enough to make out what it's saying. Not that he doesn't already know. "That doesn't make any—no, I get that, I’m just asking how," she says, frustrated, and the fuzzy voice interrupts again. He can hear Karppi in the other room, chewing on her lip. "Okay," she says. "Yeah. I can come by tomorrow."

She hangs up and stomps into the living room and walks just in front of where he's sitting, kicks him lightly in the shin. 

"Ow," he says, raising his eyebrows. It didn't hurt. It's the principle of the thing.

"You put me in your will?" she says. Her face is a blank of confusion. "When were you going to tell me that?" He opens his mouth, but she goes on talking over him. "When did you even have time to make a will? You're young! Young people don't think about these things."

"I'm not young," he says. "I'm dead." Karppi gives him a stony, unimpressed look. "Last year," he admits. "After the radiation poisoning. Seemed like a thing to do."

"Oh," she says. Her eyes go thoughtful, almost tender, and then she frowns and points her finger at him. "But... you left everything to me! I didn't ask you to do that! I mean, it makes it easier now," she acknowledges, sidetracking her own stream of consciousness. Her brain runs on so many tracks that it’s never very surprising to find the conversation’s jumped one. "Kind of like you left it to yourself."

"Wasn't really my plan at the time," he says, dryly. 

"That's what I'm saying," she says, and sits beside him; he puts his book down and pulls her under his arm, settling her to his chest. She's so warm it's unbelievable, like a hot water bottle, a little golden bonfire. He rubs her shoulder and warms his hand on her, greedily. "You hadn't even known me very long," she says. "Who writes someone into their will that they barely know?"

A fool already in love, he thinks.

"You were kind to me," he says instead, and presses a lingering kiss to the top of her head, scents the bouquet of her sweat and detangling spray. It’s Saturday and the kids are avoiding them at the movies and she hasn’t bothered to shower since getting out of bed; she smells like them, together. It’s intoxicating. He tries to focus on what he was saying. "And you were… a widow, with kids."

"God," Karppi says. "You're so sentimental." But her arm slips around his waist. She burrows closer and sighs into his chest. 

Her heart slows eventually and her shoulders relax and they sit in silence for a while, him with his cheek in her hair and his eyes closed, relishing the feeling of her pulse, her even breath, the minutest twitch of her muscles. For a minute he thinks she’s fallen asleep, but then she turns her face down flat into his side. “It would have killed me,” she says, muffled in his pullover. “Going through your stuff. I've done that before. It's not like... if you’d really,” she says, and breaks off. She inhales and then rolls off him and sits up, swipes at her eyes like she’s embarrassed. “Anyway,” she says, and he reaches out, strokes her cheek with his thumb. She lets herself be pulled in for a kiss, then wraps her hands around his bicep and clutches at him, suddenly intense and grasping. He parts her mouth and sucks at her bottom lip, feels himself slip into breathing: she does this to him, moves his heart and his lungs, the dead parts of him, wakes him in ways that shouldn’t be possible. He groans and turns them, pressing her down into the couch on her back, kneeling between her legs, mouthing downwards from her neck to her breasts through her thin shirt. Her eyes go glossy and wanting and she arches up against him, making them both inhale, and reaches down to fumble with his belt buckle. He kisses at her throat, sucks at the line of the jugular: her heart quickens but her gaze turns even more heated. He was afraid, the first time he did it without thinking, afraid that it was too—but she likes it, they’re both finding out, and he’ll do anything she likes.

“Ah, fuck,” he breathes, when her hand slips into his jeans and circles him. 

“Mm,” she agrees, and then wriggles him aside to pull off her shirt and shimmy her hips out of her leggings. She tosses them both over the back of the sofa. The musk of her cunt hits him like a freight train and he drops down to kiss a path from her tits to her stomach and grab at her hips desperately. He kisses down her pelvis and parts her thighs to kiss along the artery, then presses his face into the fabric of her underwear and inhales deeply. She’s already wet, soaking through; it sends a thrilling shiver down his spine. He was never so earthy and uninhibited before the change, never got so absorbed in things like smell, like taste; he wasn’t selfish in bed but he wasn’t nearly this decadent, either. This is maybe the only thing he truly likes better about himself now, this version of himself. Karppi swats at him and swears and he grins into her and mouths a gentle bite over her mound with his blunt human teeth. She tilts her head back and shudders at the pressure, though it’s barely a touch.

Sakari peels her out of her underwear and slides two fingers down to press on her, slipping between her folds to dip into the wetness at her core; he swears under his breath and wills himself not to come at just the hot feeling of her skin, her slick. He’s got a hair-trigger these days, or maybe just when it comes to her. Everything he feels, he feels like an electric shock, overwhelming. He’s working on it. Karppi tugs impatiently at the bottom of his pullover and yanks it over his head, and then he shifts back down to lick and suck and finger her until she’s digging her heels into his back and crying out. He smiles and then bends down to flick her clit with his tongue one more time. She jerks and trembles; another hot rush of her coats his mouth. Sakari licks his lips and comes up to kiss her again, more. He’ll never get enough. She doesn’t flinch at the taste of herself. She’s not shy but he knows she’s a little surprised by how much he likes to go down on her, the things he says about the heavenly tang of her cunt. 

There’s only one thing in the world that tastes better than this to him. But he’s trying hard to never drink it again. 

She slings one leg over the low back of the sofa and drags him down, inside, and he slides in to the hilt and groans in the back of his throat. For a second the fangs threaten to come down, from sheer sensory overload, but he pushes them away and scents at her neck; she's grounding, somehow. He focuses on the feeling of tight heat and the perfume of her body perspiring sweetly under him. They kiss and he levers himself up and down again; her thighs clench him and they find a rhythm together, rocking tight and hungrily like they could really join into one, lose themselves. Dissolve. Forget where she ends and he begins. His body is warming against hers, and he’s hitching a breath now and again as his cock parts her, fills her; he is alive in her arms for this moment, revived and remade and consumed. Her eyes glow and her mouth is reddening and her hands smooth up and down his back, trailing fire from her fingertips. Sakari lowers his head to kiss her and she bites at his mouth gently and his tempo stutters, feeling shocky and too close to the edge of coming. Karppi can see it in his face; she smiles and kisses and nips at his wrist, holding tight to the side of the couch by her head. “Close?” she murmurs, the tease. He kisses her again, slowly, and strokes around one nipple with his free hand. Her knees clench around his waist.

“You first,” he says. She grins and curls her knees up higher so he can fuck her deeper, hit just the right spot. He bends his own knee for leverage and grinds into her and the couch rocks up on the floor a little. She cries out, a stuttering yelp that builds as he circles his hips. She wraps her fingers around the backs of his shoulders to angle up and clenches deep in her cunt and lets go, wails once and then pants out short, sharp, groaning little breaths. She collapses flat onto her back and smiles at him and the stars in her eyes push him over; he shakes in her arms and spills into her heat, still fucking her in little shudders through their joined aftershocks. He lowers himself onto her and she wraps her arms around his waist, noses at the juncture of his neck, below the ear. 

And then he slides down and licks her clean while she shudders and pants and comes again in his mouth, loudly, tasting like salt and jammy wine.

When he pushes himself up and slides over to curl around her body, she turns her face to his and her eyes are damp, thin tear tracks on her cheeks. “Sweetheart,” he says, surprised. Well, at her, and at himself. He’s never called anyone that before. He pets her messy hair, gathers her tighter. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says, and bubbles into a breathless little laugh. “Just,” she says. “You’re still here.”

Christ, she breaks his heart.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says. He hopes she can hear the promise in it. But Karppi just looks at him, unusually vulnerable and soft-eyed. His tigress, the terror of Helsinki’s criminal class. He's grateful that she gives this to him. But he never forgets the rest of her: the cutting edges and blunt sides, the impermeable walls of ice and rock she’s erected to most of the world. The column of steel that forms her spine. Her underbelly is easy to adore, but he loved those parts first. “You’ll have to get sick of me," he says.

She runs her fingers through the hair at his temples; brown now, to match his new ID.

“I don’t think I will,” she says. 

When her leave is over—Sten’s replacement insisted, and honestly they were fucking so much in those first two weeks that they barely noticed time passing—she lands a new case, a double homicide down by the cruise port. It’s not the same as before, and who knows how long they’ll be able to keep this up, but she brings the files home and lets him go through the photographs with her, read the interviews and reports. She even smuggles him into the crime scene in the trunk and convinces the uniform officer to go for coffee while she takes another look at things. 

The bodies were found behind an electrical unit out on the pier: two women in their twenties, without purses or wallets. Identification’s been difficult, not least because of the savagery of how they were killed. She walks him through the forensics again. There's nothing here he can see that Karppi hasn't already noticed. But he bends down to the concrete anyway and sniffs the lingering bloodstains: there’s something strange about them, something that doesn’t line up.

“Three,” he says, surprised, and looks up at Karppi, who’s keeping watch. “There were three of them.”

“Hm,” she says. “How can you tell?”

“Because the third one wasn’t human,” he says. He gets up, brushes off his knees. “It lost a lot of blood, but didn’t die here, I don’t think.”

“Jesus,” she says, appalled. “Another vampire?”

“I can’t tell.” He wrinkles his nose, then reluctantly shifts; the ridges and fangs emerge, and he takes another, deeper breath through his nose. His senses are a little keener when he’s not holding onto his human face. He doesn’t know why. Karppi turns into a heat map of fiery orange in front of him. He looks down at the bloodstains and they’re an oil slick of color, mottled and difficult to read. “It doesn’t smell the same as last time. But I’ve never met another one, and I don’t know what I smell like, either.” Karppi nods, considering it, then goes down onto her heels and rests her clasped hands on her knees. Studies the ground.

“I wonder,” she says, “if there’s—”

“Karppi,” he says, and holds up his hand. “Someone’s coming." He didn’t hear the soft footfalls until just now; too distracted by the blood, maybe, or the continual hum of the transformers. They’re at the end of a long pier, half-hidden by the shed and its little chain-link fence, with no clear line of sight towards the gate at the other end. And the car’s on the other side, in view of whoever’s coming.

“I told that idiot to take his time,” she says, under her breath. Sakari looks away from her, towards the dark water beyond the pier. It'll be cold, but the cold can't kill him anymore. What he’s thinking must be obvious on his face, because she scowls. “Get real,” she says. “Just… go to the opposite side, circle around or something.” She shoves him away from the sound of footsteps, closing in. “Go!”

He slips quickly and quietly to the edge of the shed and ducks around just as someone in a light-colored coat and wool hat comes around the opposite side. “Oh, hey,” he hears Karppi say, with some actual surprise in her voice. 

“Welcome back,” Peltola says, cheerfully. He should have recognized her already by the wooly hat, or the smell: herbal tea and honey moisturizer, from the big bottle always sitting out on her desk. She’s carrying coffee, too. “I saw Karhu on the way in, he said you were here. Thought I’d bring this down to you myself.”

“Thanks,” Karppi says. There’s a silence, in which he tries not to shift audibly against the shed or rattle the fencing. “I was just about to head out.”

They's nothing for a moment but the quiet sounds of people drinking coffee, and the lapping of the water. "I'll see you—" Karppi starts, and then cuts off. He cranes his head around the wall a little, keeping out of sight, and sees Peltola take her arm from off Karppi's sleeve, sheepishly. He slides back around the wall and glances towards the car. He might make it, but it's so damned quiet down here: as softly and swiftly as he runs, the sound will carry, at least this far.

“I know I’m not him,” Peltola says, on the other side of the pier. “But I think we’ll work well together. At least I hope so.”

Sakari can only imagine the feelings cycling on Karppi’s face right now.

“Mm,” she says. “Has there been a match yet?”

“No,” Peltola says. “But they’re combing missing persons for us. I’ll call you as soon as there’s a hit.”

“Good." He can hear Karppi's heartbeat pattering anxiously. "Hey, why don't you come and look at this with me, I want to know what you think," she says, which is a sentence he's never once heard come out of her mouth in the course of an investigation. He would be offended but he's sure she doesn't actually mean it. "Down at the end of the pier near the water," she adds, and he takes it for the signal that it is. When they start walking in the other direction he slips around the opposite side of the shed and sprints lightly for the car. 

He manages to wrestle himself into the trunk without too many creaks and thumps, and closes the latch carefully. It's close and dark and redolent of gasoline and funk in here. If they're going to make a habit of this he ought to have it steam-cleaned, maybe get a washable liner. Things you suddenly consider when sunlight will kill you and your old coworkers think you're dead. Of course, they never did find his body, something the rest of the team avoided telling Karppi for days. Eavesdropping on that eventual phone call was fascinating for the sheer novelty, but also fairly depressing. He actually liked his job. Liked his place in the world. Worked hard to get it. He hasn't really gotten as far as imagining what could replace it, as the options seem… limited. Maybe he can be a rat-catcher, providing nobody minds if he eats the rats.

It's not inspiring.

He sighs and waits and tries not to brood, and after what's probably only five minutes, he both hears and senses her coming. She's hurrying, her boots are clipping swiftly on the damp concrete. There's a second pair trailing behind hers, but Peltola isn't really making an effort to catch up.

"Lunch tomorrow?" Peltola calls.

Karppi makes a non-committal sound and opens and shuts the car door, the impact vibrating through the frame. She starts the car, then knocks a couple times on the door or the dashboard, he can't tell. He knocks back on the reverse of the backseat, which would only sound like a muffled thumping to her. 

"That had better be you," Karppi grumbles under her breath, just loud enough for him to catch. She lets him out a few minutes later, around the back of a parking garage where there aren't any streetlights, and sniffs at his coat when he takes over the driver's seat. "You smell like a gas pump," she says.

"And you're a bed of roses?"

It comes out sounding more irritated than he means it to. She only raises an eyebrow. Probably because he's told her a dozen times already how good she always smells to him. Damn. He really can't keep his fool mouth shut these days.

"You should have brought a thermos," she says, airily, and settles into her seat. "You're still a bottomless pit."

"I'm fine."

Karppi smiles at him, leans back on the headrest, looks out the window. Outside, the warehouses and docks roll by. She's right, of course. 

"You're not so different," she says, eventually. "Whatever you think."

 _Maybe,_ he thinks. That may be exactly his problem.

"Why do you even own this?" Karppi says, amused, holding up one of his little porcelain egg cups. To be honest, he doesn't know. He used to buy kitchen things on impulse, out of some weird urge for domesticity that didn't really express itself anywhere else in his life. It's ironic, even a little sad, that food doesn't taste like much to him now unless it's very acidic or vinegared or spicy. He still has an interest in crackers, for the texture, but eating anything but blood has… familiar side-effects. Still, it's worth it to take part in eating, to accept when Karppi passes him part of her snacks in the car, the way she used to. His body may not be human, but his brain still is, and therein lies his present difficulties.

Packing up his apartment wasn't especially complicated: Karppi met his landlord for the keys, even though he already had the other set in his pocket, and they spent a couple of days boxing up anything he wanted. The rest went to charity. He didn't need his sheets anymore: Karppi's new bed is bigger.

"I don't know," he says. They're sorting through the last box of his plates and cutlery, incorporating it into her cupboards and drawers. It's taking longer than he thought. He didn't actually realize he owned this much, used to think of himself as a minimalist. It's been a rude awakening, having to carry it all away. Even more of an awakening to realize which bits of it he no longer needs. "Get rid of them if you want."

"Not if you still like them," Karppi says, absurdly. She's the one who questioned it in the first place, he thinks. "We have room."

"What am I going to use egg cups for?" he says. Something about this is itching at him; it's been itching at him for days, as they sorted through the leftovers of his old life and tucked them into corners of Karppi's flat. He has half of her closet now. He has no idea why it's making him feel slightly crazy. "Throw them away or don't, I don't care."

Karppi watches him carefully and then sets the egg cups onto the back of a high shelf, where she keeps the mugs she uses most often. 

"You never lived with a girl before, did you," she says. It's not a question: Karppi’s read the evidence of her eyes and come to the correct conclusion, as usual. He stares down into the box: four more bowls, the correct size for yogurt. Which he doesn't eat anymore. Karppi leans into his side, tucks her hand into his back pocket. Smiles at him. It's tinged with easy happiness, and also with memories and joys and griefs that don't include him. It doesn’t make him feel lonely, quite the opposite: it’s a warming relief to be with someone who has an old wound in almost the same place as his. He’s never loved anyone like this before, never felt the urge to mingle his cups and winter clothes and yield his mastery of the bathroom decor. It’s strange to find he’s even capable of these desires; it makes him wonder what else is behind his own inner doors. She is not just a detective, but a safe-cracker, too. "It's normal for this part to be a pain in the ass,” she says.

"Ah," he says. He ducks his head, presses a slow kiss to her cheek. Karppi squeezes him a little through his jeans. "Then we're doing it right."

Forensics continues to insist that there are only two sets of DNA present in the blood samples, and his nose continues to insist on three. 

"Twins," Karppi says. She slaps a printout down on the table. The photograph shows two girls with identical faces: dark-haired and elfin, posing in front of a high school graduation banner about six years ago. Amelia—now identified as half of the current double homicide—and Chloe, her mirror image.

He scans the notes under it. 

"The sister's been missing for a year already?" He considers it. "Maybe she was turned and went into hiding."

"Maybe Amelia was hiding her," Karppi says.

That’s too close for comfort, he thinks.

“A year is a long time,” he says. “If she was going to kill her sister in some kind of frenzy, wouldn’t she have done it already?”

“Hm,” says Karppi.


	2. Chapter 2

Emil corners him after dinner one night and says, “So, are you mom’s new boyfriend or what,” and Sakari briefly considers whether running immediately out into the night to avoid a simple conversation is something that an adult vampire could reasonably do.

Small chance.

“That’s up to your mom,” Sakari says, quietly. She’s loading the dishwasher in the other room but she’s doing it suspiciously gently. He’s only been living here for a few weeks, and Emil hasn’t said anything much about it yet, but they both knew it was coming. It’s been making her nervous. And anything that makes her nervous threatens to bring his fangs out. Not that Emil wouldn't find it thrilling; frankly, the kid watches too many adult sci-fi shows.

“That’s such a cop-out,” Emil says, and Sakari grimaces. He’s not wrong. But any other answer feels like he’s trapping Karppi into a formality she hasn’t asked for or offered, or worse, rejecting her. “Do you love her?”

Emil is only a little younger than he was when his parents died. People lied to him all the time back then, about anything and everything: oh, no, it was quick. There was no pain. They didn’t even know it was coming. You’ll love living at the center, there are lots of nice kids there your age. Don’t worry, things are going to be fine. He could sidestep the question, of course, very easily: it’s a grownup matter. It doesn’t concern you. But here he is sitting on Emil’s family sofa in Emil’s family flat. He is sleeping with Emil’s mother, and if what is happening between them works, if it sticks, it will change Emil’s life forever. It manifestly does concern him. Not to mention the fact that one day, probably not too long from now, there will be even scarier truths to reckon with: it's one thing for mom to get a new boyfriend, and another for that guy to be, well. Emil's given the heavy new curtains and Nurmi's freshly-acquired sun allergy and sudden unemployment only the most perfunctory attention, but soon he'll stop being twelve and utterly uninterested in their adult lives, and they'll owe him a real explanation. Most grown-ups forget what it’s like to be constantly reminded that the world you inhabit isn’t yours to command in any real sense. 

And besides, it’s the height of vulgarity, he thinks, to lie to a child about something this important.

“Yes,” Sakari says.

Emil considers it.

“Okay,” he says. “You can be her boyfriend.”

“He can, can he,” Karppi says from the doorway, giving up the pretense of not listening. “This is somehow your decision?”

“Fine, I don’t care,” Emil says, and throws his hands up. “I’m going to go watch _Westworld_.”

“Who’s been letting you watch that?” Karppi says, hackles rising. “Henna? Your friend… Noé's dad?" She turns her glare on Sakari. “This guy?”

“No,” Sakari and Emil say, simultaneously. 

“Men,” says Karppi. But there’s a hint of a smile on her face. “Always sticking together.” 

Later in bed, with the lights out, she lies facing him with her hands tucked under her chin, and says, “You do, huh?” 

He brushes a stray curl out of her face, kisses the back of her knuckles.

“I do,” he says.

“Okay,” Karppi whispers. “You can be my boyfriend.” And then cracks up and covers her mouth to stifle the sound. He rolls over and squishes a little oof out of her and she pokes him hard in the ribs until he rolls away. They grin at each other conspiratorially in the dark, like kids at a sleepaway camp. It's stupid to put a name on this, maybe, to try and box up what they have into a little word. In the past he was always the reluctant one, unwilling to name things first, but that's no surprise: he's always been an abject coward for commitment, ready to part over the most trivial challenges. The pathology of his self-protective instincts would probably be obvious and banal to a professional. Anyway, they had a word between them already that suits him fine: partner is still how he thinks of her, his responsibility to her, a feeling that goes over and above some kind of proprietary claim. 

His eyes are keen enough now to trace every line of her, even without light. Her beauty is the pensive kind, thoughtful and wary, catlike. Her sunbeam hair is soft as silk between his fingers, like white ribbons in the dark. She might have laughed at the word, but he could hear her heart beat harder when she said it. He accepts the laugh and the heartbeat, both, and holds her until she falls asleep.

"The roommate's lying to me," Karppi says. She's sitting on the floor of the bedroom, ostensibly sorting through old papers to clean out a drawer, but actually just looking at old baby photos and school records and making privately wistful expressions over them. She hasn't said anything about babies in general, but he knows she's thought of his… son, in the last few weeks. He has too, as much as he'd rather not ever touch that memory again. Something in him can't help it. It's like itching at your own healing skin. But every train of thought he starts ends at the same inevitable conclusion: dead men don't have children, can't claim children. Can't be part of their lives, even at a distance; not counting Karppi's children, of course, who are taking their cues from her, and therefore have a shade of her startling nonchalance about his status. He's not sure what he is to them, what he could be. What they or Karppi would even want from him. Just that question is puzzle enough that the gordian knot of Laura's son isn't something he should even think about, ever again. Shouldn't worry about. Shouldn't mourn. He never wanted to be a father, it's true. But he's not sure what it will mean to be an absent one. And he's not sure he wanted the possibility to be so brutally severed off from his life.

The boy will grow up thinking his father is in the ground.

Karppi frowns and sets another yellowed envelope into the 'shred' pile. Sakari turns his attention back to her: the worried lip, the knee drawn up to her belly. The heartbeat that's as familiar now as his old, misplaced pulse. "She's scared of something," she says.

"Chloe, coming back for her too?"

"I don't think so," she says. Her eyes go distant, like she's pulling the casefile apart page by page in her mind. "You know they worked together? Chloe and the sister's roommate. At BioTenGen."

"That's… the startup?"

"Biopharmaceuticals," she says. "Chloe was in an internship there, animal research department. They have a lab site about fifteen minutes from Katajanokka."

"Spitting distance from the port." 

"Uh huh." Karppi draws her other knee up, rests her elbow on it. "There's still nothing on the other girl. No dental matches. Peltola's been checking records from Tallinn, just in case. But it's like she doesn't exist."

That night they swing by the roommate's apartment building; they stand outside pretending to say a long lovers' goodnight until somebody holds the door for Karppi. He sniffs up and down the stairwells and the elevator, trying to catch the same strange scent from the pier. "Anything?" Karppi says, while he's going over the mailboxes. He shakes his head and they go out again, into the chill. 

The days are lightening, slowly: in a few weeks the frost will break and spring will be at its heels. He'll miss the sun setting at five o'clock, early enough to pick her up around the corner from the station and go out for a late espresso, to walk along the waterfront with a line of red and purple still sinking down at the edges of the sky. But he's a creature of deeper sense and instinct now, and the feeling of the approaching thaw touches some animal part of him, something raw that feels the coming of wet earth and tender leaves and spindle-legged young. It's probably a predator's gift, but it's less ugly than it might be. Just a tingling awareness of things awakening: a dead thing's keen sensitivity to life. 

Instead of heading back, he pulls them into a parking spot in view of the BioTenGen building, and Karppi chews her lip.

"You have a feeling about this place, don't you," he says.

"I don't like coincidences," she admits.

They sweep the perimeter of the building, tucking their collars up and holding hands and walking casually until they’ve figured out the coverage of the security cameras. There’s a sleepy-looking guard at the desk behind the double doors at the entrance, but they don’t bother trying to get inside; she can come back tomorrow, in daylight, to ask questions. There’s a back door and a loading dock, but nothing really pings his senses until they pass beneath an old-fashioned fire escape ladder: it was a garment factory once, apparently, and some of the bygone look was retained in the renovation, probably a requirement of the historical commission. Sakari stops under the scaffolding and cranes his head and inhales, catching something potent and unfamiliar—nothing like the pepper and vinegar of his dead maker, more like firewood and dark coffee, a warm heavy smell that’s somehow strangely wild, woodsy, like a walk in a pine forest. Karppi watches him as his face shifts in and out of its ridges, digging in the air for any traces left behind. Whatever it is, the scent-trail’s leading straight up, so it must have gone that way. He’s not sure how: the lowest part of the scaffolding is mounted at least five feet over their heads.

Karippi eyes up the distance. “You think you could jump that?” she murmurs. He glances between her and the ladder again.

“How?”

“With your, you know.” She mimes a jump. “Vampire strength.”

Huh, he thinks.

He crouches down and springs and just— _launches_ upwards, like a compressed spring set loose. It’s momentarily terrifying. He leaps and careens in the air for a split-second before his hands catch the lowest rung and swing him downward again, instead of just dropping his body like a stone. He hangs there for a minute in sheer disbelief, rocking slightly back and forth. When he glances down he sees Karppi wide-eyed. 

“I was joking,” she says. And grins. “You could play in the Korisliiga, maybe. Their games are indoors.”

He rolls his eyes and climbs up and then pushes the old ladder down to her; it creaks and groans a little with the unfamiliar movement, but it holds. Together they climb up the side of the old fire escape, peeking in the darkened windows here and there, but there’s nothing much to see: most of the labs have frosted glass, and the offices are visible but unremarkable. The scent gets stronger the higher they climb. When they crest the edge of the roof, just above the fourth story, he catches a flash of movement and ducks down, pulling Karppi with him. They look at each other, a familiar silent telemetry taking over: Karppi reads his face and nods, settling back into her heels, and without looking backwards he slips up and over the ledge, drops down to the flat ground of the roof. His fangs slip down instinctually as he circles the roof in a crouch. There's a shadow fumbling with an access door on the far side, the nexus of the coffee-scent, an unexpected slash of bright red in the heat map of his vision. As he draws in he can sense the rapid heartbeat, the tension in the smaller body before him; a sensation crawls up the back of his spine, shivers down his limbs and into his jaw, which tightens as if there was already flesh between his— _hunting_ , he thinks, startled out of his bloody train of thought. 

_I'm hunting._

It's disorienting enough that he freezes for a second; the smaller shadow jerks its head up. It's thin and short, smothered in a baggy coat and hood, slender legs in tight jeans sticking out beneath the parka. The heartbeat means they're not a vampire at all but human, obviously, despite what alarms his nose has been raising. And feverish, to radiate that kind of heat. 

"Don't come near!" it yells. It's a woman's voice, young and angry. "I don't want to hurt you!"

That's a surprise. Sakari straightens up. Pulls his fangs back, with an effort. Takes a few slow steps forward.

Takes a guess.

"Chloe," he says, and the young woman on the other side of the roof goes perfectly still. "I don't want to hurt you either."

She tilts her face up, almost like she's scenting the air, and then snorts.

"Pull the other leg, vampire." She squares up, rolling her head back with a little crackling of bone and cartilage. "You want dinner, you're going to have to work for it." And then something in her face and shoulders… ripples. She hunches forward and there’s another, louder cracking, and her chin and mouth suddenly—jut forward, into a muzzle, and her neck darkens with sprouting fur and her hands are suddenly outstretched, reaching, curling into massive claws—

“What the fuck,” Sakari says, awed, under his breath.

And then Chloe is leaping for him, sprinting lightly across the roof and swiping for his face in midair with one huge cruel clawed hand; he only barely ducks her swing and comes up again snarling reflexively, fangs out. He skids backwards out of her reach, panting unnecessarily. He can feel a deeper rage boiling under his surface; so deep and edgeless it actually scares him. He puts his hands up one more time, to try and calm things down: for her, for himself. “Enough, stop!”

She snarls and crouches, springs up again, but this time he gauges it better and slips to the side and strikes out hard, uses her momentum to knock her aside. She takes the hit in her stomach, hard enough to jar his own shoulder; he hears the air pop out of her in a gasp. She’s winded and falls awkwardly, rolling away. When she comes up on her hands and knees she bares her teeth, rows of them like sawblades in her lengthened, horribly split mouth. 

“Bloodsucker,” she hisses. 

“I’m not hunting,” he says, which is mostly true: it wasn’t intentional. “I just want to talk. About Amelia.” Chloe’s reddened eyes go wide and hurt for a second, then narrow in rage. She makes a doglike growl in her throat and pushes up, stalking around him, her hands flexing in and out of ragged fists. When she lunges forward and claws at him again it’s less fluid and more vicious; he blocks and swings out of her reach, the two of them moving in circles around each other, lips curled up over their fangs. His nose is full of her scent and the pounding of her heart, thudding with each strike she lands on him: she claws at his belly and his sweater snags and tears and a cut opens up, stains him red in a line across his waist. The pain makes him snarl and lash out: he punches her in the nose twice and follows her down as she falls, fangs grazing her arm. She lands in a roll and knees up at his belly wound savagely. They wrestle for a minute until she flips them, and then she’s sitting on his chest, snarling for his throat. Sakari holds her off, but just barely: she’s as strong as he is, twice as furious. Her eyes are pure red. He bites her forearm, hard, and she yelps and gives way just enough that he can shove her off and twist away, and then he hears the click of a hammer being pulled back. He looks up: Karppi’s climbed the edge of the roof, with her gun raised and eyes hard. Chloe spins to snarl at her. He doesn’t have a heart but it leaps anyway, in fear.

“Get away from him,” Karppi says, evenly. Chloe growls lower and compresses her bent legs like a spring, as if she’s going to lunge, and Sakari scrabbles quickly across the roof to grab her ankles and bite deep into her calf above her boot, shaking her furiously in his teeth like a terrier. Her blood is like lava, hot and strong and metallic. Chloe screams and kicks him off and limps out of reach, blood streaming on the ground behind her. Sakari wipes his mouth and stands up, keeping Karppi at his back.

Chloe watches the two of them with fury in her face; her eyes dart between them. Her huge, doglike nostrils flare at the end of her muzzle and she looks at Karppi with more focus, the red swirling in her eyes. Her mouth opens and she pants and he realizes she’s scenting Karppi, that the rich sweet smell of her human blood is doing things to her. The way it does things to him.

He shifts further in front of Karppi.

“Chloe,” he says. “You don’t want to do this.” Because I will tear your throat out without hesitating anymore, he doesn’t say. She seems to hear it anyway. Her wolflike lips curl in challenge, but she doesn’t move. The three of them stand for a second in stillness. Behind him, Karppi breathes long and slow out through her mouth, a trick to steady her aim. Two heartbeats patter in his ears. But the red is leaching slowly from Chloe’s gaze. Her muzzle recedes and her hands curl into loose human fists at her sides. Her blood is still heavy in the air, making his head spin.

“I’m with the police,” Karppi says. She hasn’t lowered her gun, but her other hand’s slipped into her coat, brought out her ID to hold it open in front of her. “We just want to know what happened to your sister. If there was… a fight,” she says, delicately, considering what she’s just seen. “If you know anything—”

“You think I killed her?” Chloe says, bitterly. Neither of them say anything. “Sure,” she says. “Why not.”

“If you didn’t, you should help us,” Karppi says, gently. Chloe looks back at her, and her face does something strange. She glances away, her fierce gaze suddenly looking vulnerable, and very young, and then meets Karppi’s eyes again. 

“If you really want to know what happened,” Chloe says, “look in the basement.” She gestures down at the roof.

And then turns and leaps into a sprint, straight for the edge of the roof, like she's gone mad; he springs after her but it’s too late. The fabric of her jacket is at his fingertips, slipping away, when she reaches the edge and flings herself out into the air—

—and soars and falls and grabs out for a ledge on the opposite building; her fingers catch and she hangs there for a second, then drops down to a lower ledge, catches again, and repeats it until she hits the ground and springs into a run, straight down the alleyway and out of sight. He watches from the edge of the roof, stunned. Karppi’s come up behind him, in time to see her final few drops. Her hand rests on his back. For a second he closes his eyes and just feels it, the pulse through her palm, the way everything in him turns to her, like a leaf to light. The borrowed blood inside him is still surging, but not so much that he can’t force it back down again, bring it to heel.

“Come on,” she says.

They drive home in almost silence, her at the wheel. She’s thinking so intensely he can almost hear the gears. The slash in his stomach is already healing by the time they’re parked outside her flat, but it pulls painfully when he gets out of the car. They go upstairs and he sheds his clothes in the bathroom and rinses off in the shower, dried blood reconstituting in the water and swirling down in bright streams to the drain at his feet. After a few minutes, the bathroom door opens and shuts again. She slips in beside him, warm and naked, and her arms go around his waist, resting carefully over his healing line. They stand like that under the stream for a while, his hands cradled over hers. 

“The world is stranger than we thought,” he says, and Karppi hums her agreement against his shoulder.


	3. Chapter 3

Karppi’s up early to drive to Kouvola, to interview the twins’ grandmother, who seems to be their only living relative; when he gets out of bed around noon he finds she’s left him a list of names and companies to google. When he's showered and dressed he sits down with the laptop and goes through it methodically. Background research can be anesthetizingly dull, but now it brings a welcome feeling of usefulness. The work propels him cheerfully through the rest of the afternoon. Emil comes home after school and plugs himself into the television and they set about comfortably ignoring each other.

She calls him from the car on her way back.

“I’m starving,” she says. “I’m so hungry I’m driving angry. Now I know what you feel like all the time.”

“Hmm,” he says. He hears her laugh.

“Can you get a pizza? If you order now it should get there just before me.”

“What do you want on it?”

“Oh,” she says. “Uh. Veggies?”

“Really?”

“Shut up,” she says. “I like healthy things too.” She doesn’t, actually. But whatever she wants is fine. It's not as if he gets actual nutrition from food anymore, and besides, it hardly matters to him what's in the sausage now. He doesn't have either an ecological or a digestive leg to stand on. When she hangs up he dials the pizza place and then tells Emil he’s going to take a walk and wait for it outside. Emil gives him a thumbs-up from underneath his blanket nest on the sofa.

The sun’s just barely down; the water is still glimmering, and the streetlights are coming on in blocks at a time. The air’s colder than he is, which is pleasant and refreshing. He takes a lap of the complex, walking between the trees with his hands in his pockets and his nose up to the faint evening breeze.

For a little while, he almost feels human.

He is living halfway between the daylight and the moonlight, sort of: he goes to bed with her and sometimes even falls asleep a little when she does, but mostly he gets up again in the small hours and takes a walk like this, or a drive, or reads or watches muted late-night movies. He finds it hard to sleep deeply until just before the hour approaching dawn; something hot and restless gnaws at him whenever he lies down in the dark, an unsettled desire to be up and moving, to be eating, to be stalking along the water like a trapped panther and breathing frigid air out invisibly. Night tugs at him like a strong rope, and he has little choice but to come along. He won't hunt, of course. Everything rides on that refusal. But the empty motions of hunting help to take the edge off. They wake and satisfy him at the same time, remind him of what strange things he's gained. Sometimes he is oddly hungrier at night, and lonelier and darker in his thoughts. It’s been worrying him still, what he’s going to do. With his time, with his… life, so to speak. Night guarding’s not out of the question, but it doesn’t really offer advancement. Maybe advancement’s not something he can imagine for himself anymore. Or maybe he could be a researcher; he’s used to combing through financial records, legal databases. Certainly it’s a more interesting option. He wonders who would hire him without needing to see his face or check his records too thoroughly. It’s probably impossible.

But then again, even werewolves are real, he thinks. It buoys him up a little.

It’s not entirely inconvenient, being nocturnal, considering the strange hours they always worked, and that she still mostly keeps. And he knows that Karppi is glad to have him home when Emil gets back. He has tried to give her children space, not to be too overbearing an interloper, or to seem too falsely eager to play the role of caregiver. Henna's been pointedly avoiding him, staying with friends most of the week. He doesn't blame her. At least he and Emil have developed a decent routine. Sometimes, like tonight after he brings the pizza up, Emil even asks him to play a game.

"He hasn't asked me to play since he was still eleven," Karppi says, with tender jealousy, when she comes home to find them battling cartoon avatars in jetboats. Sakari had been losing, badly; so much for vampire reflexes. Maybe he could blame it on having slightly greasy pizza hands. Henna had actually watched them play for a while, disinterestedly, and then gone out again. She would have actually appreciated the spinach and peppers and mushrooms on the pizza, or at least he thinks so. Karppi is picking most of them off. He eats whatever she doesn't, without comment. As she eats Karppi watches Emil, absorbed now in his phone, from the other side of the kitchen. She takes a bite of her denuded slice. "He's getting too old to like his mother anymore."

"That's natural," he says, confidently, as if he knows what it's like, to still have parents after preadolescence.

"Sure," Karppi frowns. "But I don't have to enjoy it."

He doesn't have anything else to say about that. He remembers what he was like at that age: a miserable little shit who wanted a motorbike and left crumbs everywhere. He remembers it more clearly than he should, considering how long ago it was now: that probably means there is a tiny un-therapized part of him trapped forever in amber in that blank time, frozen just before the horrors, still unable to make sense of what happened next. Or maybe it's just plain old shame that makes embarrassed memories of his childishness feel so crisp. If his mother walked into the room right now he's not sure what he would do. Beg her to play a game with him, maybe. There are many things you outgrow and then learn to wish back. Emil will probably feel the same someday.

After he's done the dishes and Emil has been safely installed at a sleepover with a friend on an upstairs floor, Karppi turns on some music and opens a bottle of his wine and brings the files out from the double homicide. She doesn't see a contradiction between casework and a romantic night in; just another of the many weird small ways in which they're fundamentally compatible.

She spreads papers across the coffee table, laying out the profiles and reports in neat piles, matching them up with his printouts of research. She sits on the floor with pictures fanned around her, sipping from her glass and chewing her lip; the familiarity of it suddenly tugs at his senses, hard. A strange mood comes over him.

"You know," he says, watching her work, "you really shouldn't take these out of the station."

Karppi's face makes an expression of baffled rage; her brow knits and her mouth actually falls open, and then she relaxes and slaps him in the leg with a thick folder. 

"Jackass," she says. But in a second she shoots him a long, sideways look through the lace curtain of her hair, and then he knows he's not alone: she's caught it too, the deja vu of this moment. He can almost feel it all it again, that night, now more than a year vanished: the alcohol on her breath, the drugs still tickling unwanted in his bloodstream. The frustration and arousal and longing and tenderness she'd stirred up in him and left to settle, like a glass of sand in water. They hadn't even really been friends yet, but nothing had ever shocked him into high heat so quickly as the taste of her mouth; nobody else's pain had ever touched him exactly the way her honest grief had. Nothing had ever felt like the warm damp cheek she'd turned into his chest, like the exhausted slump of her caught up safely in his arms. He’d stayed awake for hours watching her sleep, making sure she didn’t puke again, but mostly feeling consumed by the need to do something good for her, something right, no matter how small or insignificant. In the morning he’d gone out for coffee, brought back pastries she was too still a little too nauseous to eat. 

He hadn't been a person people trusted that way, with such naked vulnerability as that, before her. He hadn't been a person anyone came to on purpose for kindness. Help or assistance, yes. Romance, or just sex, or fun, certainly. But not kindness. He's capable of it, and he’s tried to give it. But most of his friends and girlfriends have treated him as if he were essentially cold, shrugged at it, accepted it as fact. He'd come to accept the same. He'd never seen it as a maintained illusion until she showed him that it was. Before her it was an overlooked door, firmly locked, shut up tight between him and other people, even people he purported to care about. She'd kicked it in without thinking. 

"This is the CEO you're interviewing tomorrow?" he says, instead of answering the question in her eyes; it's suddenly too much. He slides a glossy photo of a fortysomething man in an expensive suit across the table. Studies it: the high forehead and arrogant gaze, the pinched mouth and slightly receding chin, and despite that a bland inoffensiveness that magazine writers would probably stretch to describe as handsome. Arvo Niska is rich enough to have been perfectly styled for this photo, but unpleasant enough that his sour personality is showing through anyway.

"Yeah." She lowers her gaze, opens up the folder she whacked him with a second ago, to read what he's put together. "I've looked at his profiles. Anything else I should know?"

"Niska's not squeaky-clean, for starters." He sits back. "There's a lot of rumors about ethics violations, unsanctioned experiments, but anything that's gotten attention has settled out of court. His public behavior feels... cautious. Maybe paranoid. Whatever he's doing in that lab, it's going to be buried behind ten layers of lawyers." 

"Ethics violations?" She scans a couple of pages. "He's still conducting human trials, though."

"Alzheimer's research," he says. "Telomeres, telomere therapy. Extending the lifespan. He's got an incredible amount of funding. I think it's made him bulletproof, legally."

They read. Mostly. The air is still strained, or rather charged. Every now and then Karppi leans over him to snag another folder or a notepad; she's changed into a loose scoop-necked sweatshirt and it keeps slipping down. He sips the wine. It goes to his head differently since the change, heightens rather than softens, until the world is almost a vibrant gradient of feeling. He can smell her sweat, the low arousal simmering beneath, egged on by alcohol and proximity. On her fourth brush past, reaching for a pen, he can't help it anymore. He loops an arm around her waist and drags her closer, mouths a lingering open-mouthed kiss onto the bare curve of her shoulder. Then lets her go. He licks his lips; she’d tasted like electricity, like current moving through seawater. Karppi stares at him, dark-eyed, lips parted. He hardens a little in his jeans at just that, just looking at her face, her pinking cheeks.

They would have fucked that night, he knows, if she'd really wanted to. Maybe it’s wrong to think of it that way. She’d only needed comforting. But he knows that if she hadn't been drunk, if she hadn't been miserable, if there'd been control and intention in her eyes, he would have given her anything she wanted. He would have been desperate for it. He hadn't gone to her apartment at nearly midnight because he wanted to review the case, for Christ's sake: he'd wanted her. He hadn't even known in what way, though the kiss had cleared that up for him. If she'd really desired him and not just oblivion they would have fucked right on the floor on top of the crime scene photography. And then probably ruined his whole life in the morning when he did something insane like regret it for professional reasons. He's glad they didn't go that way, didn't wreck things before they really started. It had already meant more to him than that. He'd just needed to be close to her, to look at her face, hear her words, no matter how belligerent or cutting. He still feels the same need, often, though his means of slaking it have increased. He's not sure what it's like for her, if it burns like this. He hopes so. He thinks it must; her heart is like a drum.

Karppi is still watching him; her eyes have a touch of wildness in them, like she can hear what he's thinking. Like she's picturing it too: her warm body pressed to his old warm body, being lifted off the floor; his hands in her hair, the hot kiss that drove harder and higher until it broke. He shifts and looks back at the folder in his lap and pretends to regain interest in the file, at least until she pulls it out of his hands. 

She studies his face, tenderly; her person of interest.

"You like taking care of me," she says, her sensitivity bordering again on clairvoyance. He’s never liked taking care of anybody, he thinks. It’s the complete opposite of what he always wanted. But in his fantasies now she’s always smiling. In his fantasies he’s made her happy. 

"Yes," he breathes, and in that moment realizes clearly that it’s true. Her hands are on the knee of his jeans; her fingers are like licks of fire.

"I know, love," she says. She slides down off the couch, settling on her knees in front of him. Her eyes are hypnotic; all of him is vibrating. Karppi slides her hands up his thighs and leans up to kiss him. He meets her halfway, cupping her face and pressing their mouths together. Karppi breaks the kiss to smile at him, sphinx-like. "You acted so cool, so hard with me before, but," she says, and puts her hand up to his face; her thumb grazes his bottom lip and he opens his mouth to nibble at it. He's too undone to make the obvious joke; he's hard for her, all right. But Karppi knows already: she presses her other hand to the bulging crotch of his jeans and a moan punches out of him, his body literally quakes. She smiles. "You want to be sweet, actually," she says, low and soft. "I see you. You're transparent now." Like glass, like water, to the depths: she sees through to the abyss at the bottom of him, and wants him anyway. It’s overwhelming. He dips to her mouth again and kisses it desperately.

Somehow Karppi gets him out of his zipper without pulling away, and strokes him until he could cut diamond, then she ducks her head and blows him there on the couch, with the files still spread out everywhere. He holds her hair out of her face for her and strokes the back of her neck dizzily while she sucks and hums around him and removes his entire nervous system out through the end of his dick. When he's at the edge she takes him all the way down to the back of her throat; he gulps a breath and jerks and comes and comes and comes, sparks behind his eyes. Afterwards Karppi sits straddled over his thighs with three of his fingers in her cunt and her sweatshirt pushed up over her tits so he can kiss them; she moans breathlessly and grinds down onto his hand and clenches around him and comes with a long, gasping cry. Her body’s so warm he could burn like kindling, like he’s been touched with sunlight. He circles her clit with his thumb until she gets a rhythm back up, rocks slower this time around his fingers. When she comes again she melts against him, presses down into his chest, and he holds her so tight her heart palpitates through him, echoes in his ears.

Eventually Karppi gets up. She kisses the tip of his nose to tease him, then picks up her underwear and ducks into the bathroom. He sucks his fingers off contentedly while she’s not watching.

Later, when they’ve finished the wine and his eyes are focusing and unfocusing at a news site on the laptop, Karppi sits up and pulls her feet out from underneath his legs. She holds out a page for him; she’s highlighted the phrase _exotic animals_ in yellow. It looks like a call report. “Anonymous complaint,” she says. “They called the wildlife agency about fourteen months ago and said he was dealing in exotic animals at the lab. Apparently someone thought it was plausible enough that they stopped a cargo shipment.”

“They find anything?”

“No,” she says. “But do you think… exotic animals,” she says. “Could that be a euphemism?”

For a second he’s too stunned to answer. But then something else catches.

“Fourteen months,” he says, and flips back through the notes. “That’s almost exactly when Chloe left her job and disappeared.”

They look at each other.

“I have to get into that basement,” she says.

He wakes up early, restless. It’s not even ten in the morning yet. Karppi’s already left for BioTenGen for the interview, but he knows what she really wants to do is break into the labs on the lower level. Which may mean that someone is shooting at her by now. He hopes that she at least told Peltola where she was headed. She’s been getting some flak for not checking in enough; according to her it’s no big deal, but she also said that to him the last time she was under review.

He’s trying not to dwell on it.

Henna is home too, surprisingly, and awake, and also in a mood; when he rises to consciousness he can hear angry music thumping through the wall. He lies in bed for a while, listening idly: it’s some German band with a droning bass and mumbled lyrics he can't quite catch, enhanced hearing or not. It’s been an adjustment, living here. He’s not used to roommates anymore. He’s barely used to neighbors. His last apartment had been virtually soundproofed. Privacy was the first thing he went looking for when he aged out of the center, and he’s had it for a long time.

It's finally noon by the time he drags himself out of bed and into the kitchen, to gulp down what's left in the big camping thermos they keep in the fridge. They’re out again; it’s taken him a while to figure out how much he actually needs. Sten was right, damn him: getting hurt increases his appetite significantly, and the more blood he drinks the quicker he heals. He needed almost a gallon after getting his ass kicked on the rooftop the other night. When the sun goes down he can go to the butcher's. His biggest feed is always late, anyway. He tries not to do that while the kids are around, so he's quick about drinking his fill now and he washes the thermos out afterwards, scrubbing the red out of the crevices of the screw top. Last night’s dishes are staring at him too, so he rolls up his sleeves.

When Henna comes out of her room he's still drying and putting everything away; she smirks and sprawls down on the couch, tapping at her phone. But he senses it anyway: the thin spike of anxiety she gets when she looks at him. Not to mention the roiling dislike that emanates from her now when they’re in the same room; he wouldn’t have to be a vampire to catch that. She’s quiet and relaxed and friendly around Karppi these days, almost bordering on clingy, but towards him Henna has only a facing wall of ice. He let her down, he knows. That explains the dislike, at least, but not the anxiety. Unless she’s still unconsciously thinking of him as a police officer. It has to be the Subutex, the footage from the ferry; whatever she confessed to Karppi about under the bridge that day. It's obvious, but it's also obviously something Karppi doesn't want him to touch. He's told her everything he knows about the investigation: about the footage, the traffic stop, the car. She'd listened and thanked him and then gone out onto the balcony and smoked for an hour in silence, alone. He hasn't brought it up with her again, or said anything to Henna. Nobody from narcotics has come around yet, but it doesn't mean they won't. He hopes they’re both ready for that. He isn’t.

He would have pushed it, before. Pushed her and Henna into a corner. He knows he would have; he would have been just as trapped as them. But death freed him of the necessity. Maybe he should be more grateful for that than he is.

Eventually Henna tosses her phone down in disgust and slides down the back of the low sofa and sighs loudly. He keeps sorting the silverware. After a while she turns her narrowed gaze his way. It's an intense look she's giving him, not so different in character than Karppi's, though it bears less of her penetrating capacity for analysis. He wonders if Henna would appreciate the comparison, understand it for the compliment he believes it to be. Maybe these days she would, now that she and Karppi have come to some kind of pleasant truce.

"You actually like her," Henna says, finally. He meets her eyes. So they were both thinking of Karppi. "I thought at first you were just freeloading. Lost your job, got sick… found a woman to take care of you." He frowns, and Henna laughs softly at his discomfort. "But you're really trying to impress her. Our house is cleaner than it's ever been."

"You're an adult," he says, coolly. He's suddenly not in the mood for Henna's reversed insecurities. He doesn’t have to walk on eggshells for the rest of his existence for hanging up on her, even if he feels like he should sometimes. "You can work the vacuum anytime you’d like."

Henna snorts.

"Then what would you do all day?" He doesn't dignify that with a response, just moves on to the cups. She wouldn’t say these things if Karppi were here; she obviously wanted to catch him alone, get out some of her anger towards him. Fine. She can work it out without his active participation. "Is it a tax thing?" Henna says, after another few seconds. There's a tense curiosity in her voice that strains to surface. "I never imagined you as a scammer."

"What?" he says, surprised out of passivity.

"Weren’t you a cop?" she says. "I wonder what your old buddies would think." She has no idea what they would think, thankfully. Sakari sets down the dishtowel. Regards her. He’s not mad. Rather, he’s starting to think he understands what happened to her. Henna scared herself, he thinks.

"If you have something to say, say it," he says. 

They stare at each for a minute. Henna's face is making a strange expression; her heart patters again, with that same vague brush of fear. He honestly can’t grasp why, unless he’s terribly wrong about what frightened her.

"Somebody told me you're dead," she says, finally, which is not at all what he thought she was going to say. In his head there's a popping sensation, like a balloon. He tries to stay still, not to lock his knuckles on the counter, where he’s gripped the sink. "That there was a funeral and everything."

There wasn't, actually; just a brief memorial service at the station, organized by Peltola. If it had been possible to thank her for that, he would have, but of course he didn't. Right now he actually feels very dead. He inhales to calm down, and then suddenly hopes he didn’t do it too loudly, because Henna might actually realize he hasn’t been doing it at all.

"That’s crazy," he says, trying for nonchalance. Henna's eyes flicker.

"Who would bother making that up?" she says, and then narrows in for the kill: "I know you faked it all. I saw all the letters coming from lawyers and banks. You transferred everything, like you actually died. You don't have an account anymore, do you? She gives you money."

Fuck. She really is Karppi's daughter.

"Henna," he says. He prays his face isn't betraying him. Hopefully a scam is all she’s considered. "Whatever you think, you're wrong."

"I think," Henna says, bitterly, "you're no better than me after all."

She gets up and walks out and shuts her door; he goes into the bathroom to splash water on his face and stare into the mirror. He doesn’t know why he ever imagined that everything could stay a secret. He doesn’t know what to do. There’s a sound from the hallway; he goes out and finds that Henna has left again, taking the rucksack she leaves by the door. He’s not surprised. But it’ll hurt Karppi’s feelings, if she’s gone long. 

He sits on the edge of the bed in the dark for a while, with his head in his hands. It’s not like anyone’s going to pay attention if Henna starts talking about her mother’s mooching boyfriend faking his death; it sounds like nonsense even when he thinks it. This household just doesn’t need to attract any more attention to itself. He’s dead, Henna’s probably wanted, and Karppi’s not exactly the poster child for departmental harmony. She’s been warned before. If a single pebble topples off this pile the whole mountain may come down.

What a fucking mess.

It’s only a few minutes later that Karppi calls; she’s on her way home. 

“He doesn’t look like the photos anymore,” she says, without preamble. “He’s sick and hiding it. Dying, maybe.” That’s significant, he thinks. The most exotic animals of all are the kind that live forever.

“You get into the labs?”

“No,” she says. “But I have an idea.”

"Am I getting shot again?"

"Oh," she says. "No." There's a pause. "Maybe."

"Okay," he sighs.


	4. Chapter 4

The wildlife service is no help; one of them calls Karppi back afterwards and says that they were warned off Arvo Niska by their supervisor six months ago, and that this is the last they’re willing to say about the whole affair. So much for that. And calling in customs would be more trouble at this point than it’s worth, so Karppi goes back to the drawing board.

“He kind of implied I should already know about it,” Karppi says, through a mouthful of fries. They’re sitting parked by the water, eating a late supper: a takeout burger meal for her, and his thermos of pig’s blood. Henna is, theoretically, putting Emil to bed. Hopefully she's not going through more of their mail. He hasn't told Karppi about that conversation yet, though it's itching at him to do so. He finishes his mouthful and screws the cap back on. “Makes me think the supervisor was told off by someone else.”

“Police?” he says. Her mouth flattens; a grimace of affirmation. “Somebody we know?”

“Maybe.” Her gaze slides out and away, towards the passenger window. She’s silent for a long moment, chewing. “Did you ever wonder,” she says, finally, “how Sten knew that animal tranquilizers would work on you?”

He didn’t, before this moment. It’s not really what stood out in his mind about the experience.

“Vampires still have circulation,” he says, and pauses. “I think. Maybe it was a gamble.”

“Maybe it wasn’t,” she says. “What if they were connected?”

“Nisko and Sten?”

“Yeah,” she says. She wads up her empty wrappers and stuffs them back into the paper bag. “Sten was a hunter.” That’s true in many senses of the word. He knows in what way she means. “He and his partner could have been getting other vampires for the lab. Like, as guinea pigs.” She shifts around to look at him. “I guess I don’t know what other vampires are like. Do you think he would have done that, the other one? Turned in his own kind for experiments?”

“Yes,” he says. That's an easy question. The thing that made him was barely better than an animal; competition in the wild is cause enough for killing. She gives him a considering look, then settles back in her seat. They sit for a while looking out at the blurring lights of the cargo terminal, across the bay. He clears his throat, when the silence starts to press on him. “That’s another way to get to Niska,” he says. “We should consider it.”

“Oh?”

“Giving him something he wants.”

It’s like she doesn’t hear it at first, caught up in another internal track, winding her own thoughts up and around the loop; when his words finally land true she swivels to stare at him in horror.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous,” he says. “What other options do we have right now?”

“That’s not an option,” she says, and it’s uncomfortably familiar, the hard flat tenor of her voice: the rookie’s being dressed down. He can feel himself frowning at her, and she frowns back, equally grim. “You can’t be serious. I thought you were past this.”

“Past what?”

“This,” she says, and gestures at him angrily. “This thing where you don’t care what happens to you.” Christ, he thinks. He leans back onto the headrest and stares into the felt ceiling of the car. “You want to get put into a fucking cargo crate? You’ll get vivisected. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“You’re not listening,” he says. “I’m only saying it could get us closer, get his attention.”

“You don’t need his attention,” she snaps. “His attention is dangerous to you.”

“We’ll set it up,” he says. “I’ll wear a camera." But mid-sentence she pops open the door of the car and gets up, slams it behind her. Through the windshield he watches her pace out to the end of the landing, arms wrapped around her middle, her breath coming out in bright puffs of white steam against the headlights. She stands alone, facing away, lit in relief like a neon figure. Against the greater darkness she is a solitary small shape at the gaping mouth of the water; she looks like a painting, a blurry old photograph with haloed edges. He’s tempted to go out to her and equally tempted to stay here and sulk. He does the latter for a little while. Finally he can’t stand it anymore. He climbs out of the car, walks to her. He’s not going to apologize, he thinks. She certainly won’t. “Look,” he says. “I'm not volunteering for a firing squad. If we can just get enough for a warrant—”

“I’m sorry,” she says, unexpectedly. He stops short, looks at her softened eyes. He forgets what else he was going to say and pulls her into a hug under one arm; she joins her hands behind his back. They hold each other while the water laps at the piers under their feet. 

“I don’t want to die,” he says. Not for real, for good, he thinks. That's changed. He presses his cheek to the top of her head. “I have too much to lose.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Me too.” She squeezes his middle, then lets him go. Brushes her hair out of her eyes. They get back into the car without saying much else. “You're not wrong,” she admits, when he’s pulling them out onto the service road. “It could be an advantage." She fiddles with the zipper of her coat. "I just hate the idea.”

“Okay.”

“If there was a way to… dangle it in front of him, maybe. Without you getting too close.” She’s biting at her lip thoughtfully, mental wheels resuming their spin. “Like security camera footage or something. It might be useful to see what he’d do.”

“Exactly my point,” he says, dryly. She shoots him a dirty look, then rests her head back, regards him sideways. He turns his blinker on, shifts them onto the exit lane.

“Who’s hunting for him now, I wonder,” she says. “And how many people who work for BioTenGen know about all this?”

“Can't be many. How would they keep a secret like that?"

"I don't know," she says. "Maybe it's easier than we think. Who'd believe them?"

Nobody, he thinks. He barely believes it himself.

She brings Amelia's laptop home the next day and sits staring into the screen all afternoon into the evening, chewing her nails. JP had the search histories and deleted files restored, and while they're provocative they're not exactly illuminating: witness protection, whistleblower laws, first aid. Some of them are surprisingly specific: how to correctly withdraw an IV line. Boat rental agencies in Kotka. Obviously, she was planning to run. But was she frightened for her own life? Or someone else's? It's hard to say, considering the body that was found with hers, the other girl who shared her fate. They still don't have an identification on her, no dental records have made a match, no amount of databases have turned up a person of her exact description. There's a tattoo on the girl's mauled left calf, two thin black triangles facing downward, like arrows pointing to the ground. There's nothing about those on the internet either, though it's not surprising: they look to have been done by hand, amateurishly. Some kind of initiation, maybe, or else just a couple of teenagers experimenting on each other. There's so little that they actually know right now.

Finally Karppi closes the lid, tosses it next to her on the cushions. He watches her from across the room, over the top of his own laptop, his screen filled with Amelia's bank records. He hasn't made headway either, unless a year of takeout lunches and online movie rentals and new mid-priced office attire is more revealing than it appears. Karppi leans her head all the way back and slides down a little until she's a long boneless line draped across the sofa. His frustration from yesterday night has evaporated, risen away like mist. She's so tired, he can see that. He doesn't regret making his suggestion, but he does regret the old bruises his idea resurfaced. 

"You should get some sleep," he says.

"Mm."

But she doesn't move.

"Karppi," he says. She sighs, and if possible slides a little further down. Her hair hangs in tangles over the back of the couch like golden vines, like an exhausted Rapunzel. He ducks his face, wondering at himself for thinking that. When did he get so whimsical? Maybe when his existence became a folktale. A ghost story. Him the beast and Karppi the woodcutter's daughter, axe hefted over her shoulder; fearless, guileless, untroubled by wolves.

"Ugh," she says, unconscious of his childish thoughts, and lifts her hands with effort to rub at her eyes.

He closes his laptop and gets up from the table, comes over and puts his hands on the back of the sofa; bends to meet her mouth with his, to press kisses along her bare arched neck. She squirms away from him a little, ticklishly, but knots her fingers in the front of his shirt to keep him close anyway. The gesture warms him. She smells like sweat and sleepiness and drugstore shampoo; it’s all he can do to keep from licking the pulse jumping in her throat. Instead he follows another impulse, slipping an arm under her curved spine and pulling her gently upright. He bends lower to scoop his other arm suddenly under her seated knees and then he’s lifting her up, hefting her easily into a carry while she huffs a startled breath and grabs at him. He takes her into the hall, angling her dangling feet around the turn; the woodcutter's daughter now a baffled captive princess in his arms. “What’s gotten into you,” she says, and links her fingers behind his neck. He doesn’t know.

In the bedroom he sets her onto the duvet and rolls her onto her stomach, then straddles her and presses the heels of his hands into the tight planes of her neck, stroking downwards along the blades and the muscles bunching in her back. “Oh,” she sighs. She buries her face in the covers and he feels her loosen beneath him, sink a little deeper into the bed. He rubs her neck up to the back of her scalp, scratches a little there with his fingernails to hear her moan; then kneads down and up along her spine, circling to draw the stiffness out slowly down her arms, to her fingertips. “Oh, God,” she says, muffled, as he works a knot out of her right shoulder with the heel of his hand. She sighs deeply when it comes loose, with softening delight. She’s so warm under him, warming further between his thighs as she tenses and relaxes with pleasure; he’s hard in his jeans from that, but it’ll keep. He can feel how lax her muscles are getting with even his clumsy attention. He’s not great at this; he’s never really practiced. But she’d been sitting hunched up on the couch with the computer so long that just looking at her was making his back ache. He digs his knuckles in along the column of her vertebrae, leans down to brush her hair aside and kiss and nose at the top of her spine. 

She’s right about this, about him wanting this, he thinks. To be good to her in ways foreign to him. He can feel it now without the sense of helpless exposure. Maybe part of it is the change, after all; the way he feels as pulled to her as he is pulled to the night. It's a tether he can't ignore or rationalize away. Better to follow where it leads.

Her hand drifts back, to squeeze at his leg.

“Better?” he says.

“Mhm."

Eventually she’s on the verge of sleep; he thinks she’s almost there when she rolls over, pushes him onto his side and drapes herself onto his chest, an arm hooked around his neck again, a leg tucked over his. He strokes her arm and she turns her face into his body and in another minute she’s out, her small hitching breaths smoothing out and her arm limp and heavy over him. He spends a long time just laying there with his eyes shut, feeling the rise and fall of her side, the way she cuddles unconsciously inwards, rubbing her cheek and huffing breath against his shirt. In the dark of the bedroom it’s cocoon-like, cavelike; in here the world is far-off and forgettable, and the room is silent but for the even patter of her heart. He listens to that and thinks about nothing at all.

In the small hours she shifts and turns and he holds her until she settles again, then slips out of bed and goes out to stand on the balcony in his bare feet, absorbing the chill and watching the distant glitter of traffic on the bridge; the lonely patches of lights here and there in the darkened apartment towers, the flicker of his fellow insomniacs moving restlessly from one room to another. He can see his old building from here. There is one light on over there, still, on a different floor. He can’t remember whose flat it is, if indeed he ever knew. He didn’t speak much to his neighbors. He was too busy, too preoccupied. Uninterested in small talk. Would he have lived differently, if he’d known what was coming? Talked to them more on the stairs, at the mailboxes? Maybe not. It’s not a genuine regret, he doesn’t think. He’s just left such a small footprint in the world. He wonders how many people even realize he’s gone. 

Listen to you, he thinks. He sounds like an aging novelist. He rubs his face and sighs and then goes back inside, gets his coat, toes his boots on. What he really needs is a walk. 

He drives in a slow loop through downtown, tracing along empty streets like a doodling pen. The nights are getting warmer but there's still only a handful of people out at half-past one in the morning, walking purposefully through the darkness: uniformed workers heading to or from a late shift, people hurrying furtively back from a lover's apartment, street dealers blowing into their cupped, chilled hands in graffitied doorways. He avoids the usual haunts of the narcotics squad. His car's not exactly attention-grabbing, but it could be recognized. Almost everyone at the station has made a crack about it to him at some point. He wonders what they think of Karppi keeping it around, driving it for work like he did. Probably nothing; like him they're all used to her doing whatever she wants.

There’s an all-night cafe in Kruununhaka that he’s stopped at a couple of times recently, to get a coffee late and walk along the streets by the old cathedral square. The square is a place of attraction and repulsion to him now, in equal measures; one night he tried to walk up the steps, driven by some unknown desire to sit at the top, only to feel as if something was pressing lightly but steadily on his chest and on his head, pushing him bodily backwards. He’d made it to the top step of the porch but realized he could barely go further: the closer he got to the cathedral threshold the harder it was to stand, to keep the pressure in his head from feeling as if he were about to pop like a split grape. He’s not nearly metaphysical enough to have any idea what that all means. His parents were Christians but he hasn’t attended a church or really thought about doing so since he was twelve. If there really is a God it’s hard to see how vampires could be permitted to exist. He doesn’t feel particularly defiant towards any concept of the divine; he is no rebel angel, not even a willful devil. He feels almost nothing about the idea of angels or heaven or souls. Maybe that’s the problem: maybe souls are real, as real as vampires, and dying emptied him of his. He doesn’t feel so different, but maybe he wouldn’t. Is a soul a personality, or more like a conscience? He still has that, he thinks. If it exists, can it be felt? Can it be missed?

Too fucking early or too fucking late for this line of reasoning, he thinks, and parks the car.

He pauses on the sidewalk in front of the cafe windows, just before reaching for the door handles; there’s a handwritten sign advertising for a server. He used to work at a cafe when he was living alone in Malta a year after he finished school and left the center; he’d flirt with customers and make good tips and spend most of it immediately, getting high with his coworkers and kids from the German hostel on top of the city walls in Valletta at night. He’d lie on his back in the dark with blown pupils and stare up at the stars and feel perilously close to nonexistence, which is what he’d wanted back then. At least he knows he can work an espresso machine. Maybe this would be something. Something more than wandering around at night; a way to keep a little money coming in, to stave off boredom. He looks at the sign, at the potted plants lining the window. It’s a nice place. He likes the baristas already, at least to chat with while the drinks are made. He should go inside, ask about the job. What could it hurt? He’s got good enough false papers for this; if he’s really lucky they’d even pay him under the table. 

He doesn’t go inside. He wills himself to do it, but all his body does is stand there like a useless sack of grain. Fear is making him feel flushed, which is nonsensical but true. He can suddenly see that he’s afraid of what will happen if he doesn’t find something else to do. Karppi will get tired of hauling him around in the trunk to crime scenes; eventually he’ll lose touch with the procedures, the technology, the new databases. Become irrelevant. No longer a partner, just a sounding-board. He can trail after her forever, asking increasingly ignorant questions, or he can move himself in a new direction. It should fill him with determination, but it doesn’t. It fills him with despair. 

He leaves without even getting a coffee. Just stuffs his hands in his pockets and walks on, back towards the car.

At nearly three he finds himself circling the neighborhood of the BioTenGen labs; he thinks about it for a minute and then succumbs to the idea, parks in a back alley a half-dozen blocks away. Security cameras, Karppi said. The exterior of the lab is crawling with them; it’d taken careful work to avoid them last time. This time he won’t need to. He can place an appetizer in front of Niska. See if they get a bite. His face will be unrecognizable with the ugly deformities of the change; they won’t get Sakari Nurmi on tape, just a nameless monster. This at least, he can do. It’s the one unique qualification he has. 

He walks for a while to get himself ready, crossing streets as the fancy takes him, moving slowly closer and closer to the building in concentric rings. He flips his collar up and walks fast, scenting the air as he goes, picking threads out of the muddle to follow for a few blocks at a time: there’s the lingering scent-trail of an older man in musty flannels and his out-of-vogue German cigarettes, here a younger man carrying away something meaty and rich from a takeway. He tracks them to their cars or their apartment buildings, staying at a distance further than human surveillance could afford: he can hear their hearts at a hundred paces, catch their steps and fumblings with keys even when they’re out of sight. He watches and follows and moves on, switching tracks, switching tails. He catalogues as he goes like a surveyor, an assessor: noting the dumpsters and service entrances, the storefronts and window grates and manholes and garages. The landscape of business and sociability and daylight stripped away to night’s hunting ground. He might need all of this later. Might need to know how and where to run.

At some point his fangs slip down, his ridges rise. He doesn’t stop them. It only makes things sharper, keener, clearer. It’s wrong to play at the edges this way, he knows. He knows his limits, but he also knows it’s entirely possible to pass them by without recognizing it. Still, he wants to make this seem authentic. He turns his face up to the cool air and breathes in through his mouth. 

Tastes... fear.

Fear, and industrial cleanser. It stings in his soft palate. He’s barely a block from the rear of the BioTenGen building, in sight of their employee parking garage; there’s a short man in a bulky parka sweating his way towards the pedestrian door, swearing under his breath and trembling as he walks. There is a peppery scent lingering around him, a hint of something astringent and dangerous and unpleasantly familiar, but it doesn’t seem to be emanating from his body. He’s been in proximity to one of them, then. There’s a keycard or an ID dangling from a lanyard around his neck. Sakari can’t see the logo from here, but he’d bet a lifetime supply of pig’s blood what it would be. This is an even better opportunity than he imagined. 

He walks light-footed through the garage, sticking to the walls and shadows, moving at a speed slightly faster than human; he catches up to the man in the parka easily and hugs the columns on the parallel side, unbreathing and silent and coiled to strike. He’s made for this, this more than anything else, and the rightness of it sends thrills up and down his spine, his nerves: his muscles are drawn and flexed and ready, awakened by the chase. His mind resents the sensations but his body is unconflicted, grateful and joyous to be set loose. He can feel his teeth aching in anticipatory pleasure, though he tries to tamp it down, ignore it. This is only a feint, after all. He has no intention of killing tonight. He'll scare the guy, put on a show for the cameras, then pretend to be driven off. He glances up to the corners of the ceilings; the security cameras sit placidly scanning the main aisles. He couldn't have staged this more perfectly. 

The man in the parka stops at a nondescript grey hatchback, opens the rear gate and fumbles around inside it for a minute; Sakari inhales a breath he doesn’t need and steps forward out of the cover of shadow into the ring of vivid yellow light between them. The man glances over his shoulder and his eyes blink comically wide, like flash bulbs.

“Nice night,” Sakari says, politely, through a mouthful of fangs. He bares them and smiles widely and the man screams and throws himself backwards towards the car; his fingers fumble with the side door handle and he flips it open and flings himself onto the bench seat, trying to get inside. Sakari comes with his face up to the light, giving the cameras a good view, and reaches down and grabs the man's ankles, hauls him out of the car like luggage while he clutches feverishly at the seatbelt, the back of the driver’s headrest, still screaming at the top of his lungs. It’s cruel, but doing less would seem like he wasn’t seriously on the hunt. The man pops out of the back of the car like a cork. Sakari hauls him upright by the shoulders of his coat, careful not to hit his head on the door, and pulls him bodily into view of the cameras. The man's whaling at his arms, his face; he tries to dodge his flailing blows. But one catches him on the side of the head anyway and he lets go to block; the man swings his other arm wide and unbalances himself and topples to the ground. His hands scrabble for purchase; his fingers catch on the pavement and bleed and the smell of it kicks up to Sakari’s nose like a drug. He steps back for a second, swallowing a rising swell of hunger so intense it’s almost nauseating. He gets a grip on himself but it takes a second too long; the man rolls away and digs in his pockets and when Sakari bends down to grab him by his coat front he sticks his arm up and sprays liquid out of a tiny canister, right into Sakari’s face. It burns like blue fire and whites out the world; Sakari cries out and covers his eyes and tries to wipe it away with his fingertips, but then his fingers are burning, too, searing at the tips like he’s touched lava. He screams. 

“Take that, you fucking bloodsucker!” the man says, and kicks him in the knee; Sakari collapses to the ground blindly but strikes out hard with one fist and catches what feels like a thigh; the man hollers in pain and scrabbles away. Sakari can hear his running feet, then the slamming of car doors. He gets up, staggers away, reaching for a column to get himself upright. Tires squeal and there's a rush of wind as the car streaks past, loud thuds as it drives over the speed bumps too fast. And then he's alone in the garage, shaky and sightless. His face still feels like it's got a hot pan stuck to his skin.

He has no idea what to do.

He staggers back into the shadow, running a hand along the wall to get himself out of the parking garage and into the street. He goes along the side of the building and across the street, stumbling over the curbs. He moves as quickly as he can without tripping, hopefully getting out of sight of the cameras and away from the garage. So much for his great fucking idea. If anyone comes out after him now he’ll be dead, worse than dead. He’s an idiot. He lifts his face and tries to scent his way back to the car: it smells just enough like Karppi to be a beacon, usually. It’s the one scent he can always pluck cleanly out of the confusion. But inhaling just burns his nostrils. All he can smell is his own hot, weeping flesh. There’s blood on his cheeks from tears. At some point he’s shifted back to his human face, but the pain doesn’t stop. He crosses a dozen more blocks, counting to gauge the distance, and then crouches down against a wall, hopefully out of sight. He sits on his heels and tears off a piece of his undershirt and wipes at himself with it. It’s agonizing, but now he can almost open his eyes. The world is blurry and indistinct, maps of light and dark. It won’t be good enough to drive, he realizes. He’ll crash the car, kill someone. He’s really only got one option. He fumbles his phone out of his pocket. The screen is like the sun. He manages to dial his last called number. He hopes it wasn’t the pizza place. It rings for a long time and then goes to her voicemail; when he dials again, she picks up.

“Love?” she says, muzzily. “What’s wrong?”

“I need you,” he says. It comes out like a plea. Well, it is. “I can’t see, I’ve been sprayed with something.” He can hear rustling, her getting out of bed. When she speaks again the sleep is cleared from her voice.

“Where are you?”

He gives her his best estimate and she hangs up, says she’s calling a taxi and heading downstairs. He waits in the cold like a piece of rock, hoping not to hear footsteps that aren’t hers. Cars pass here and there on the big avenue, around the corner. Far down in the harbor, someone blows a foghorn. The pain is so bad he feels like he’s floating above his body. He is a lump of coal, of slab meat; something senseless and lifeless. A stain in the world. It was so easy to hurt that man, he thinks, blankly. He didn’t like it. He didn’t do it for fun. But it was so easy for him. So easy for a thing like him to do. 

At last there are quick steps coming closer, a quick heartbeat to match, both of which he knows; his ruined nose catches a whiff of her, just enough to loosen his shoulders and make him sink against the wall in relief. She comes over him, a yellow and black cloud, and gasps. “Oh my God,” she says, and kneels beside him, pulls gently at his chin to lift his face, turn it side to side. “What is this? Who did this to you?” she demands.

“I don’t know,” he says, to the first part, and ignores the second for now. “It’s still burning, I can’t get it off.” She touches under his eyes and he jerks away from her. “Don’t touch it, it’s chemical!”

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s just silver. I don’t think it’ll hurt me.” She pulls away; he can hear her unscrewing the cap of a bottle. She tilts his face up and pours cold milk over his eyes, wiping afterwards with some kind of soft cloth, and then pouring the milk on again. When he blinks he can see her more clearly. Everything is still stinging, but it’s better. She makes him cup his hands and rinse them too. His fingertips look cauterized, blistered. He can’t imagine what his face looks like. “Come on,” she says, and helps him up.

She drives them to where there’s a riverside park. She walks him to the edge, where little waves are chopping against the bank. He kneels down and submerges his head and hands into the bitterly cold water, soaking his knees, his coat. It’s salted and stinging, but the immersion helps after a while. The last of the silver spray washes off into the sea. He can feel his skin knitting together at last, his unnatural healing kicking in. He shakes his head under the waves and comes up dripping. Karppi comes back over, crouches beside him. She’s herself again in his eyes; he can see each individuated curl, each line of worry arrowing darts around her drawn face. He’s done this to her, again. He doesn’t mean to but he keeps doing it anyway, like he’s trapped in a maze, a loop. “You look better,” she says.

“Thank you,” he says, and swallows the sudden tide of misery he can feel welling up in him, like the water lapping at his knees. “For coming.”

“What were you doing?” she says, and stands up. Looks down at him, a tight frown setting into her mouth. He sighs and stands, water draining down his legs. 

“Can we talk about this later?”

“No,” she says. “What did you do?”

“I fucked up,” he says, bitterly. “Okay? I went to the labs. I followed someone. Tried to make it look like... but obviously they knew how to handle vampires. So you were right, it was a stupid fucking idea. Happy?”

“Of course not,” she says. “I didn’t want this! Now you see why!”

“You’re always right,” he says. His body feels numb. He’s not sure why. A delayed reaction, maybe. “And I’m always wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” she says, and steps in front of him. “Why are you acting like this? You’re not the only person—”

“I’m not a person!” he shouts. “I’m not a person!” Karppi stops, her mouth still parted on a word. His face throbs again viciously at the movement of speaking and his fangs split out of his face like knives, purely reactively. Karppi’s eyes widen with something; he can’t tell if it’s fear. It doesn’t matter. Seeing it shatters something inside him and the mirror pieces go tearing all the way down. His heart breaks, he thinks. “I don’t know why the fuck you love me,” he says, desperately, hating himself, and Karppi’s face crumples. He turns to walk away and she reaches for the back of his coat and suddenly he can’t bear it, he can’t stand it, and so he runs, he runs at his real speed, his true animal speed, away from her; he leaps into a sprint and is gone into the dark in the blink of an eye, running over the scrub grasses along the river, breathless and silent and dead as the moon.

He runs for miles.

He ends up in a place he doesn’t know; some marina at the end of the water, boat docks lined up in neat rows. He is walking by then, trudging along automatically, one foot in front of the other. He has no idea where he’s going or why. But he can’t make himself stop or turn around. At the far edge of the sky it’s almost dawn. There is a faint pink line rising warmly at the horizon, the aurora of day. Finally he slows and then stands by the water and watches it come, almost until it’s too late. But he can’t. He can’t. He won’t do this to her. She probably won’t love him anymore after this, but she’s a kind person. A caring person. She won’t want him dead.

There is a windowless little shed with a rusted chain at one end; it looks like it hasn’t been used in years. He breaks it open and finds nothing but old tarps and marine paint cans inside. He rolls himself up in a tarp and hides behind an old set of metal utility shelves and lies down there in a nest of old rags and trash. He stares up into the ceiling. His chest feels like lead. He thinks what he’s feeling is grief. Grief for something. His brain won’t tell him what. His phone is buzzing, has been buzzing on and off for hours, but he can’t answer it, and can’t even reach into his pocket to turn it off. He can’t move. He will never be older than his parents were when they died, he thinks. He will always be this age, and the world will move on around him. His son will die of old age without them ever meeting again. Someday Karppi will die too and he’ll be left like this, and then he’ll lie down on the ground and burn and go away forever, and nobody left on earth will remember him or care. And why should they? He's a creature. He attacked that man like a dog. He doesn't even remember how to be human. At some point in thinking all of this he starts to laugh. He got it after all, he thinks. Everything he wanted when he was nineteen. He doesn’t exist.

He’s exhausted.

Eventually his brain winds down and his worn-out body takes over and forces him down into a thin and dreamless sleep. When he opens his eyes it’s night again. His phone battery is almost dead, but it tells him it’s nine-thirty pm. His head feels less fuzzy. He doesn’t know what the fuck he was thinking. He acted like an insane child. He loves her and longs for her and wishes he could rewind time. He regrets everything. 

He still can’t make himself get up.

Sakari lies awake in the dark for a long time.

It takes him four hours to walk home. He could get a taxi; his wallet’s still in his pants. But he needs time to think. He puts his keys into the door just before dawn, but Karppi opens it before he can finish turning the handle. She stares at him for a long minute. He must smell like mouse shit, and look about the same.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not,” he tries, and trails off. “I’m sorry I lost it at you. It’s not your fault I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

Karppi doesn’t say anything. She reaches up and puts her arms around his neck and he wraps his arms around her waist, hoists her up into his arms and carries her inside, kicks the door shut behind him. He holds her so tight they could almost be one body.

“You stink,” she whispers, after a little while. Her body quivers in a laugh, the most wonderful sensation.

“Because I’m an asshole,” he says, and Karppi cracks up harder and then sobs into his neck for a second. He sets her down and she wipes her face. Looks up at him.

“You really pissed me off, you know that?” she says. He braces himself. He's earned it. Instead she takes his hand. “But then I thought… you’re sad,” she says. “You’re not… whatever you think you are. You’re just a sad person. A person who’s lost something, who doesn’t know what’s right to feel.” She cups his cheek and he leans into it. “You think I can’t recognize that?”

He pulls her into his arms again, buries his face in her shoulder. He can’t bear to look at her eyes when she answers what he has to ask.

“Were you afraid of me?” he asks. 

“No,” she says, and knots her fingers more tightly in the back of his coat. “Don't be stupid. No.”

“Maybe you should be,” he says.

“Maybe,” she agrees. “But I’m not. Go take a shower.”

When he’s clean they climb into bed and she holds him against her, so that he can hear her heart.

“I’m really dead,” he says, finally.

“You are,” she says. Her voice is so gentle. Hearing her say it is like… a rubber band snapping inside of him. Something jolts and something else settles down. Loosens. It’s so strange. “But you’re not gone,” she says. “You still have a future.”

“That’s the problem.”

“It's not a problem,” she says. "It's just something to plan for. It's hard, but that doesn't make it a problem." She turns onto her side, dislodges him to look him in the eye. “Some good things are hard and scary. Try giving birth,” she says, and smiles crookedly at him. He's never felt so grateful, so relieved. He’s never known anyone this brave. It makes him feel alive, looking at her. Or maybe not alive: he has to stop thinking of it that way, one or the other. Good or bad, wrong or right. "Okay?" she says.

Awake, he thinks. She makes me feel awake. Like morning is coming, and he is revived.

“Okay,” he says.

“I love you because you’re good, and good to me,” she says, and covers his hand with hers. “And because I want to.” If he says anything he’ll break into fragments, so he just nods and looks at her, takes her in. He feels like his eyes are new. Opening for the first time. He has something nobody gets, he thinks. A second chance. He can start over with all the things he needs, and nothing that he doesn’t. He can do better, try harder. Try again. "You feel any better?"

"Yes," he says. He does. Maybe it just had to come out, so that he could look at it in the light, he thinks. Maybe it's not so fearsome, so terrible as he believed. Maybe he isn't, either.

"Good." Her smile turns wicked. "Then you can rub my back again." 

"Oh. I've made a monster," he says, and pulls her in for a kiss.


	5. Chapter 5

When he wakes up it's a little after seven in the evening; the thin light around the curtains is yellowing out to sunset. The other half of the bed is empty. He rolls over and buries his face in the pillows and inhales her. He feels differently than he did last night; more secure, somehow. Not so unmoored, so alone in his head. Something huge and strange and consuming rises inside him, but for all the overwhelming power of it, it doesn't hurt. He has to put a hand over his chest to hold himself together. He thinks it might be happiness.

Arousal, too. He was so numb the last few days that it takes him by surprise, but right now just her lingering scent's an intoxicant, an accelerant. He's half-hard in a moment, shifting his hips unconsciously in slow circles against the mattress. He closes his eyes and breathes in and imagines her beneath him, him inside her perfect heat and her arms around his back, fingertips pressing into his skin. He grinds himself slowly against their bed until he's at the edge. He rolls onto his back and slides his hands into his sweatpants and strokes himself hard and fast; he puts a hand over his mouth when he's about to come, and suddenly imagines it's her making him be quiet, making him swallow his own soft groans as she rocks on top of him, her palm holding him down. He shakes with the fresh strange ecstacy of it, just the thought of her in control over him, and comes silently and forcefully into his hand. He collapses back on the pillows, pleasantly blank.

He comes back to himself slowly; pulls his smeared hand out of his pants and wipes his fingers and softening cock off on a pair of boxers from the floor, wads it up into the laundry basket. He can hear faint voices from the other side of the door, smell something garlicky rising from the kitchen. Probably marinara sauce from the jar. She's not a fancy or fussy cook, mostly because she doesn't care to be. He wonders privately if it used to be Jussi who took care of what they ate; she tends to ask him if he thinks something is done, if it tastes right, even though she’s the one with working human tastebuds. He grabs a change of clothes and slips into the bathroom, washes up. When he finally comes into the kitchen Karppi and Emil are standing next to the counter with one of the big salad bowls; she’s watching Emil slowly cut a cucumber into awkward chunks.

“A little closer,” she says, and takes the top of the knife he’s still holding between her fingers, corrects the angle. “Here. Thin slices.” Emil does a couple of good ones and then cuts wide again, making a triangle. Karppi picks that piece up and eats it, and sets Emil right again. She might not be a chef but she’s a patient teacher, Sakari thinks. He comes up and kisses the back of her head on his way to the fridge. “You want some spaghetti?” she says. He does. But first he wants to drink the thermos dry; he hasn’t fed in a day and a half and his stomach is screaming at him.

The three of them eat quietly; the only excitement comes when Emil manages to drop sauce down the front of his hoodie. When the dishes are cleared and Emil is installed on the couch with a game they go out onto the balcony to smoke in silence on folding chairs for a while, watching the very last glow of daylight disappear safely behind the horizon. She passes him her pack of cigarettes; he shakes it idly before taking one. 

“Almost out,” he says, and hands it back. She says she wants to quit when this pack is finished. Most people say that for years without giving it a real shot. He thinks she might actually be serious. He lights and inhales; they don’t taste quite the same, and the sensations of the nicotine don’t touch him anymore. Crazy to think it might be impossible now for him to get addicted. Ironic. Not like he’d miss that. Still, he doesn’t mind it, this one leftover habit. What’s it going to do, kill him? But if Karppi quits he probably will too. Be hard for her if didn't.

“I took a sample of the silver stuff to the lab yesterday,” she says, which surprises him. “Off the cloth. They said they'd get back to me today or tomorrow.” 

“What for?”

Karppi shrugs.

“It’s weird, isn’t it? Aerosolized silver? How do you even get hold of something like that?” She stubs out her cigarette and doesn’t reach for another one, though her eyes flick over to the pack. “I told them it was on some of Amelia’s clothes and I wanted it identified.”

It’s a good lie. Sometimes it still bothers him that she does things like this, stretches the truth so thin; when he was alive and they were paired together he used to worry that her cavalier attitude would reflect poorly on him. But now he is the beneficiary of her greatest lie of all. He's very lucky she is the way she is.

Instead of opening up her laptop after Emil's bedtime she puts a movie on, pulls him over on the couch and curls into him. He's happy to oblige her too-obvious desire for something peaceful and normal; he feels the same urge. Spending the previous night in a pile of tarps was clarifying but he's not interested in repeating it. His arm drapes over her side and they lay there in front of the flickering screen. It’s something he saw posters for last year but never bothered to watch, some romantic comedy coming-of-age story based on a series he was barely aware of. It’s not bad but he’s not a great judge of these things, he doesn’t watch a lot of tv. He said so once in front of JP and got called a pretentious jerk-off. Karppi at least enjoys the movie; from time to time she laughs softly into his side. She's in a good mood. In bed later she peels out of her clothes and slides under the covers naked, pulling up his t-shirt and kissing down his stomach. He yanks his pants off and they kiss while he watches her finger herself a little, then she sinks down on him, tight wet heat engulfing his senses. 

“Fuck, oh God,” he gasps, taken off-guard by how electrifying it is, and then it’s just like his fantasies: Karppi puts her hand firmly over his mouth and puts a finger to her lips to shush him. He jerks helplessly and moans, muffled under her palm. His sudden heightened excitement doesn't go unnoticed; her eyes sparkle at him with curious pleasure and he pistons up faster, harder, holds her by the hips to push into her as deep as he can go. Her hair fans out around his face, brushing his cheeks as she lowers herself for kisses. He feels so many things at once inside her, with her: wild and free and opened like a window; held and encircled, protected. He's safe like this. He doesn't always have to control himself so tightly, control the situation; she'll tell him what she needs and he'll give it to her, gladly.

She angles herself and rocks down with his palms cupping her breasts, her own hands over his. She starts to exhale and whine in the back of her throat, building to her climax; when she comes in a trembling rush he turns her over and slides out and buries his face between her thighs, swallowing at her salt-sweet wetness. He laps and flicks and sucks at her, pressing messy open-mouthed kisses into her cunt. She comes again on his tongue, her hand knotted in his hair to keep him where she wants him, her hips pumping up to almost ride his face. He’s still hard at the foot of the bed, harder and harder now as she holds his head and paints him in slick from nose to chin; he presses his aching cock almost painfully into the sheets. Karppi pulls him up and wraps her legs around him and then he’s back inside, driving in and in and in and pumping his hips as she grabs at them; it’s not very long before he’s shaking silently with her hand over his mouth again, shooting inside her in long tremulous pulses. For a soft, defenceless minute afterwards his muscles just can’t get him up and off her. Karppi doesn’t seem to mind, quite the opposite; she is murmuring soft things in his ear, her legs still cradling him, heels rubbing the backs of his thighs. Afterwards Karppi falls asleep before he can even pull the covers back up; she rolls smiling and boneless and half-asleep into his arms and he holds her with his face pressed into the bare skin of her back until he follows her down.

He wakes in the morning when she slides out of bed for work; he’s unusually cotton-mouthed and confused at the hour. He checks the clock on the dresser with surprise. Seems that if the night called him, he didn’t answer.

Karppi bundles Emil up and out and then kisses him good-bye at the door, a chaste peck, her mind already in the files again; he runs the dishwasher and bundles the sheets into the machine. Henna’s sly taunts about his domestic bent hover over him a little as he measures the powder and sets the dials and then remakes the bed with fresh linens from the closet. But then they start to dissipate. Her words have less power today to dig at him than they did before; he’s not sure precisely why. Maybe it’s because sometimes work itself is its own reward, a way of cleaning out the clutter of your mind as much as the clutter of your environment. Maybe it’s because she really doesn’t understand him after all, not the way that Karppi does. Maybe it’s that being accused of fastidiousness is literally the least of his worries. And maybe, he thinks, getting his brains fucked out last night by the woman of his dreams has just put a spring in his step.

She calls unexpectedly around lunchtime; the spray’s already yielded a hit. Apparently it’s colloidal silver, a variety banned last year by the EU for human consumption. There’s a handful of people around Helsinki who’ve been recently cautioned for selling it as a supplement on local message boards; the one that’s caught Karppi’s eye is a guy in his fifties living just outside Roihupelto.

“He used to be an animal trainer,” she says. “There's a domestic violence charge from the 90s that was dismissed. But there's two convictions for smuggling exotics. He did about six months in prison both times.” His file says it was mainly endangered parrots, chimpanzees, baby wildcats and so on. It’s a squalid business, or so he’s heard from colleagues in customs: cargo containers reeking of birdshit and pecked-over corpses, half-starved monkeys tranquilized out of consciousness and stuffed into suitcases. If this guy’s got any connections to Niska, though, he could be even more dangerous than he seems. "I’m going to head over now.”

“Peltola going with you?”

“She’s looking over the rest of the list,” Karppi says. “In case this guy doesn’t pan out. Why, you want to come?” He does, actually. But that seems impossible. He glances at the clock in the kitchen; it’s not even one in the afternoon yet. The sun is at a peak. He tells her as much. “I know that,” she snorts. “Meet me downstairs in the loading dock. I’ve got something for you.”

The hallways of the building are all enclosed, so he doesn’t have to hazard going by a window on the way to the lower passage; he sits and smokes in the loading dock in the heavy shadow of the overhang for a while, waiting. The daylight beyond the dock is intense to his keener eyes, so bright even under clouds that he has to wear sunglasses to see normally. He’s wearing them now as her car pulls in. She gets out and takes one look at him and grins. “Wow,” she says. “That’s a good look. Very cool.”

“I don’t want to go blind,” he grumbles. “Pop the trunk already.”

“No,” she says. “Here, try this first.” She pulls a big plastic shopping bag out of the back seat and hands it over. Inside there’s a huge set of coveralls with a brimmed hood that extends over his face and tight cuffs covering the wrists. She’s brought gloves and a half-mask and a baseball cap, too. He stares at the outfit while she looks expectantly at him. “What do you think?” she says. “Would this work?”

“I’ll look like a lunatic.”

“Who cares?”

I care, he almost says, but maybe he shouldn’t. It’s either this, ride in the trunk, or stay home, he thinks. He takes his shoes off and slips off his light jacket and pulls the coveralls over his clothes; they’re just loose enough that two layers of clothing doesn’t feel like being stuffed into a sausage casing, but fitted enough that he only looks semi-ridiculous. He pulls the half-mask over his head and pulls it up, steps back into his boots, slips on the cap and gloves and draws the hood up over to shade the top and sides of his face. Puts the sunglasses back on. He turns to face her. 

“Is there skin showing?”

“Not really.”

“Not really, or not at all?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “It looks covered to me.”

“Okay. Well, if I burn, put me out,” he says, and stomps grimly into the light. The first touch of the sun on his covered body is like a hot slap; he shudders once at the force of it, the way it floods him to the cracks, poking and searing and searching after a weakness. It’s hotter than the steamiest summer of his memory, but he realizes after a second that he’s not sweating. Huh, he thinks. He turns in a slow circle, taking it in. His eyes are starting to adjust a little, though he’s still grateful for the sunglasses. The dazzle fades to a glare and he blinks and Karppi comes forward to squeeze him around the arms.

“See?” she says. “This will be better than getting carted around, right?” He has to admit she’s been ingenious. 

The drive to Roihupelto is amazingly pleasant; she drives with the radio on softly and he cracks the window and absorbs the increasingly foreign scent of sun-heated car and new green vegetation out in the fields as leaves crawl upwards towards the light. It’s a different smell than in the dark, probably something to do with plant biology and heat indexes that he doesn’t know anything about. He never realized how distinct the day was from the night until he was carved off from one and handed to the other; getting a piece of this awareness back feels like remembering something important. 

The animal trainer is a guy named Rami Heikkinen; his farm is a scrubby-looking place with a series of shabby barns and sheds all across the property and a big horse pen with broken rails at the front. They pull in and Karppi parks them on the shady side of the farmhouse. Nobody comes out to greet them. They walk around to the biggest barn, closest to the house; one of the big double doors has been pushed open. “Hello?” Karppi calls. “Police.”

“In here,” comes a faint return. They go into the big barn, which smells like musty hay and wet animal. The light inside is grey and filtered; it’s dark and shielded enough that Sakari pulls down his hood and half-mask, takes off his sunglasses. There’s a massive circular cage in the center of the barn, with a big rubber ball and a couple of milk crates inside, but no animals. At the other end there’s a heavyset bearded man sitting on a stool in front of a workbench. A set of animal collars is sitting in front of him, each with little battery packs and sensor electrodes that he’s either disassembling or putting back together. 

“Rami Heikkinen?” Karppi says, and the man nods, slowly. As Sakari watches, his eyes flick quickly away from Karppi to land on him. “I’m Sofia Karppi, with the Helsinki police.” She flips her badge closed. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions abou—”

“And who’s this?” Heikkinen interrupts, nodding at Sakari. 

“My partner,” she says. “Mr. Heikkinen—”

“This guy not have a name,” Heikkinen says, quietly but not gently, and Karppi frowns. Sakari can see a flicker of amusement at her expression rising in the man’s flat eyes, which sinks back down as quickly as it surfaced. 

“Ruoho,” he says, which is his new last name on his forged paperwork. He’s now officially impersonating a police officer. He extends a hand to shake and gives Heikkinen a perfunctory grip before letting go. “You’ve been cautioned for selling colloidal silver for human consumption, is that right?” 

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“In what way?” Karppi says, and Heikkinen gives her a narrowed, disdainful look. A misogynist, Sakari thinks. 

“I was clear about not ingesting it,” he says, at Sakari instead of at her. “My listing had warnings. It’s not my fault if somebody stupid goes and drinks it. You hold that against the people who make bleach?”

“We would, if they advertised it on a supplement site,” Sakari says, and Heikkinen flushes with sudden, ill-concealed anger. 

“What do you want?” he says. “I paid my fine. Are you only here to hassle me?”

“You’ve started selling silver in spray canisters,” Karppi says. It’s a bluff; they don’t know this for sure. But it’s a good one. Heikkinen’s gaze snaps to her without any of his previous reluctance to meet her eyes. He stares at her and Sakari feels his heartbeat speed up. “I’d like to know who you sold it to.”

“It’s all online,” he says, tightly. “The profiles are sometimes anonymous. It’s not my business who buys it. I do everything legally.”

“We’re not interested in how you conduct your business,” Sakari says. “Okay? We’re just interested in your buyers.” Heikkinen glances between them, then sags a little in his seat.

“I can get you a list,” he says. “It’ll take a second. I’ll have to turn on my printer. It’s old, it takes a while to warm up.”

“We’ll wait,” Karppi says.

Heikkinen gets up with an effort and shuffles off towards the house. They stand around in the barn, since it’s shaded, even though the place has a lingering scent of cat piss and a deeper scent of rage and blood that only he might be sensing. Or maybe not: Karppi is eyeing the dirty cages with distaste. He feels the same way. He’s not sure what pleasure people like Heikkinen get out of putting lions and bears behind chain-link fences and whipping them until they do tricks. “I really want a cigarette,” Karppi says, under her breath, and sighs. He takes that to mean she’s finished the pack already. He comes over and gives her fingers a squeeze with his own, encouragingly, and her face goes tender at him, almost shy. “You’ll have to do that every time now,” she says. “Positive reinforcement.”

“What a burden,” he says, and lifts her hand to kiss it. She tugs her fingers away, smiling, and he wanders a slow circle around the barn. Eventually his gaze lands on the collars on the workbench again. Shock collars, from the look of them. They’re far too small for big cats, unless they’re for cubs. Dog collars, he thinks, and picks one up. They’re strange-looking somehow. They don’t have normal holes and buckles, or even the kind of breakaway safety buckles that he sees on most dog harnesses now. There’s a latch with overlapping loops on each end. The two ends slide together to make a single loop, as if a pin or clasp needed to be inserted into the circle to hold the pieces together. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense; any animal could easily shake a pin like that out of place, making the latch pointless. And then he sees it: a pile of tiny padlocks at the end of the bench, each with a set of tiny keys still inserted. His brain whirs. Visually estimates the average collar size again. “Karppi,” he says, urgently. She comes over and he holds up the collar for her. Slips one of the padlocks into the latch. She sees it at once, how strange it is, like he knew she would: her face makes a puzzled expression.

“Why lock it?” Karppi says. “It’s not like dogs have fingers.” He gives her a pointed look, and her eyes widen. 

“Call Peltola,” he says. Karppi gets the phone out of her pocket and she’s just started dialing when something flies through the air and sticks into the front right chest of his coveralls. They both whip around to see Heikkinen standing in the open doorway, holding a long tube at his lips. Heikkinen puffs his cheeks and Sakari shoves himself in front of her just in time to take a second dart to the stomach. Numbness floods his limbs. “Run,” he says, pushing her away, and his left knee gives out. He’s sinking to the ground and Karppi is shouting something and grabbing at his shoulders, but it’s too late for him. He hopes she’ll leave him. His mouth feels full and dry and his eyes are blinking, watering at the effort to stay open. Something behind him makes a horrible noise, loud and tearing, deafening. Like a scream. He goes down on all fours and something hot and huge and sharp rips at his back, like a thousand stabbing points of lightning. He almost blacks out at the agony of it, but then it's already softening, melting away, like all the rest of him. Karppi’s gun goes off above his head again and again and he collapses face-down into the dirt and straw and sheep shit, unbreathing and gone. It feels like there’s a weight on top of him, a thousand pounds of stone and sand. It doesn't matter. There’s no pain. There’s nothing.

He wakes up to the acrid, burning smell of her fear.

He’s still lying on the floor where he fell. The world swims around him when he lifts his head. He turns and sees a swipe of gold to his right, and strains up to look at her. But it’s not her.

It’s a dead tiger.

The tiger’s blood is spreading out into a pool on the floor; its face is a rictus of gore. Its lower half is lying heavily across his legs. His back is screaming in tight itching pain; he can feel the clawed ruts running down his spine. But he's already starting to heal. It can't have been very long. Whatever was in the darts it wasn't as potent as Sten's opiate cocktail. Heikkinen is standing with his back to Sakari, facing the cage at the center of the room. Sakari blinks. There’s another tiger pacing inside one end of the cage, rumbling angrily and occasionally turning to bare its teeth and spit at—Karppi, he realizes, in blank terror. Karppi is standing inside the opposite end of the cage, her hands wound into the chain link to keep herself upright. Her legs are trembling but her face is furious and hard, staring down both Heikkinen and the tiger. Her heart is hammering in his ears. He can smell her blood, singular and fragrant as wild roses, sprayed out on the floor, mingled with his own. It’s smeared across her face and hands, down her jacket. He realizes after a second that she is carefully not looking in his direction. Maybe Heikkinen thinks he's dead; he wouldn't have had a pulse. Karppi's bloodied gun is on the floor next to him, between him and the tiger. He slides his fingers around the grip. But the slide is stuck back. It's empty.

“Niska’s going to love you,” Heikkinen is saying to her. “Little bitch. Wait until I get a collar on you. We’ll see how much you fight then.”

Sakari gets up.

Heikkinen has time to turn around, barely; there are long livid scratches across his face that didn't come from any tiger. Sakari grabs his shirtfront without preamble and clubs him in the head with the butt of the gun as quick and hard as he can, then does it again. Heikkinen drops to the floor like a stone and lies there with his legs twitching and hands clutching at nothing. Sakari steps over him. There's a dropped magazine on the floor where Karppi was obviously trying to reload. He picks it up, replaces the empty one, and racks the slide slowly, careful not to make any sudden noise or movement. Inside the cage Karppi and the tiger are now both watching everything he does. The tiger sways and hisses and slinks along the edges, raising its nostrils and scenting the air. The room is rich with the coppery smell of spilled blood; it’s driving Sakari wild, forcing his fangs out. He imagines the tiger feels the same way. They stare at each other for a moment, him and the animal. It might be his imagination that the tiger backs off a fraction.

“Sofia,” he says, very softly and evenly. “Come towards the gate.” He’s already there, trying to slide the awkward bolts out of place with one hand while he keeps the gun raised at the tiger. Karppi sidles along the chain-link, eyes tracking the animal trapped with her. When she’s on top of the gate he reaches through and touches her arm. She inhales and exhales slowly, unevenly, but he can feel her relax just a fraction. “On three, okay?” She nods, and he counts them down. On one he yanks the gate open and she leaps backwards past him; the tiger leaps too and Sakari slams the gate into place. The tiger scrapes and claws at him and screams again in frustrated rage; it rakes and catches at his face and shoulders while he holds the gate closed with all his strength. Karppi gets up and throws the bolts; between them they get it locked and then stagger back and sit on the ground a dozen feet away, both of them bleeding from their scrapes and only one of them panting out of necessity. After a long minute he struggles up onto his knees and cups her face in his hands gently. She's been punched in the mouth; her lip is split and swelling. There's blood in her hair, too. He lifts it, looking for a head wound. She covers his hands with her own.

"It's not mine," she says. "I think it's yours." He kisses her forehead and she shuts her eyes. "Or the tiger's. How's your back?"

"Healing." He eyes the fresh tiger corpse cooling on the floor. He knows what it takes to heal faster. Karppi catches his expression; her eyes do something strange for a second, and then she gets up and stretches her neck, rubs her shoulder to loosen it. "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay," Karppi says. "I'm going to call it in. Be right back."

She walks out of the barn doors, into the sunlight. He sits there for a long minute, but it's pointless to pretend he hasn't already decided. He lowers his fangs and then lowers himself to the dead tiger's warm neck. At some point Heikkinen rolls over, groaning. He lifts his head just slightly, wobblingly, his eyes blinking blearily in and out of focus. Sakari raises his face. There's gore in his teeth. Blood runs in steaming rivulets down his chin, his throat.

"Stay down," he says, and Heikkinen does just that.

There are zip-ties on the workbench; Sakari locks them around Heikkinen’s wrists and ankles and leaves him on the floor inside the barn. He covers up again, grabbing a blanket from the barn to shield his torn-up back, and goes out to the car. Karppi is sitting on the passenger seat, legs sticking out and door open, staring into space a little bit. She focuses when he walks up. He hopes she won’t be too stubborn to get checked for a concussion, just in case.

“They’re on their way,” she says. “About twenty minutes, she thought. Traffic’s bad.”

They take a quick ten to search through the other sheds and the house, just in case there are any more live surprises; there’s a heated shed full of scraggly birds and ferrets in cages, and a couple of enormous, shaggy, half-feral looking dogs chained up by the back steps, but nothing else. In the basement they find extra-large dog kennels with combination locks on the outside and stained mattresses on the inside, and a rubbermaid tote full of old surgical scrubs. The room reeks like pepper and vinegar to him, like cold polluted water and hot tar; there’s a hundred stinging, powerful scents layered one over the other, some faint and decaying and others fresh and sharp. There have been vampires here, more than he can pick out, and for far longer than he can discern. Other things too. He’s not sure what exactly he’s smelling. There are some shoes lined up along the wall, in a variety of sizes and styles. Not all of them are men’s shoes, or even adult’s. Karppi takes a long assessing look around the room but after a minute her face goes green and sick, her mouth trembles; she climbs back up out of the basement doors without glancing back. He stays behind for a second to take pictures, then follows after her. She’s standing under the shade of a gnarled tree with a hand over her face. He comes up and gathers her up into his arms and she rests her cheek on his shoulder. 

“They were vampires,” he says, after a little while. She's unphased by dead bodies, but he saw her face when she caught sight of the smallest shoes. That's a part of herself she can't turn off, and shouldn't have to. "Nothing down there smelled human.” He doesn’t know whether that makes it any better, but maybe it'll help her to hear it. 

“I don’t care,” Karppi murmurs. “If someone did that to you I’d kill them.” 

He knows.

Karppi puts him in the trunk after that, out of necessity; it’s only about five or six minutes later that he hears other cars approaching from the distance. They pull up onto the gravel drive behind where they’re parked and somebody gets out, walks up to Karppi where she’s seated against the lid of the trunk.

“What the hell happened?” Peltola says. There’s a few rustling sounds.

“Thanks,” Karppi says. He smells astringent. Probably something for her lip. “He’s in the barn. Be careful,” she calls, more loudly. More footsteps pass and fade. “There’s a tiger in there. A live one.” She lowers her voice. “And a dead one full of bullets,” she says, to Peltola. “Pain in the ass.” In the stifling dark of the trunk he has to smile at the grumpy sound in her voice. Only Karppi could slay a tiger to protect him and talk about it like it was an inconvenience. She really is a girl from a folktale. He listens to her explain the situation, with some judicious edits. Heikkinen will contradict her if and when he regains full consciousness, but he's suffering from a traumatic head injury he received trying to kill her in cold blood, so it might not really be a problem. After a while their boots tromp away over the gravel and go out of earshot. He stretches out as best he can, folds his arms over his stomach. Settles in for a wait. The fresh blood in his veins is like a soporific, or maybe he hasn’t completely cleared the tranquilizers after all, because he finds himself dozing. He slips away into a slight sleep before he’s even noticed.

He wakes up when someone slams the driver’s side door. The engine turns on and the window lowers with a slight whine. He really should get that fixed.

“You sure you’re ok to drive?” Peltola calls. “Yeah, yeah, you’re indestructible,” she says. Karppi must have given her a look, waved her off. “Call when you get home, at least.”

“Okay,” Karppi says, and then they’re off. She drives for about fifteen minutes and then pulls off at the side of the road and opens the trunk. He climbs out. “Can you drive?” she says, rubbing at her jaw. He can. At home he parks them in the back lot and they climb the stairs slowly; he strips off the coveralls and mask before they go inside, in case Emil and Henna are home. But there’s just a note saying that she’s taken him out to buy some stuff for school and they’ll grab a slice of pizza on the way back. Karppi reads it and smiles, and a guilty stone drops in his gut. He still hasn’t told her that Henna knows something is going on. But it doesn’t feel like the moment; Karppi’s yawning and still rubbing at her face like it hurts.

In the shower she rinses out the barely-closed gouges in his back and then he washes her hair, rubbing gentle circles into her scalp while her eyes slip shut in bliss. They don’t bother getting dressed, they just climb into bed in their towels and pull the duvet over themselves to drowse in total darkness. When she wakes up he watches her check her phone; there are missed messages from Peltola. “Hey,” she says, putting it on speaker. “What’s up?”

“You’re sure Heikkinen said the name Niska to you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Guess who’s just called Heikkinen's cell phone three times in the last hour.”

“Niska?”

“Close. A guy who works at BioTenGen. Paavo Laine. Looks like Heikkinen called him first, right when you showed up to ask questions. I just confirmed Laine's still at the lab right now. I could pick you up on the way over.”

“Okay,” Karppi says. 

“See you in ten,” Peltola says, and hangs up. Karppi starts to slide out of bed, but then she stops and looks at him. She’s still naked, with her drying hair curling wildly down her back and her pale skin practically luminescent; in the dimmed light of their bedroom she looks like a nymph, a moon goddess. Her dark eyes are regarding him a little sadly. He thinks he knows what it is. He feels the same way. He can’t go with her, take his place at her side the way he used to. The way he wants to, the way he should. The fact that she doesn’t like it either is reassuring somehow.

“Call me if you need me,” he says, and strokes her arm. “I’ll come.” She nods and gets up and dresses and leaves; it barely takes her five minutes to be up and out. He thinks about all the times he pulled up in front of her building only to find her already there, staring out at the water from beneath her hood. Such a direct, unhesitating person. It used to drive him crazy and now it’s the most natural, comforting thing in the world. He lies in bed for a while thinking about the farm and the tigers; flips through some of the photos he took on his phone. He goes to the BioTenGen staff page and looks through their employee directory; Paavo Laine’s name is towards the top, apparently making him one of the senior geneticists. Sakari clicks the link in his name to view his profile, and then sits up abruptly. He zooms in the photograph. Paavo’s pinched, anxious face stares out at him accusingly. He's the man from the garage. Sakari opens his texting app; his one and only thread with Karppi is at the top.

 _Be careful_ , he types. _PL was the one I met_.

 _Got it_ , she sends back.

And then he just has to wait.


	6. Chapter 6

Laine is both excessively talkative and utterly unhelpful. According to Karppi he rambled for almost ten minutes straight about the supposed immunity benefits of colloidal silver, but claimed to have never actually met Heikkinen, Chloe or Amelia, despite the fact that he and Chloe had overlapped in the lab for nearly eleven months before her disappearance. When she'd pushed him he'd clammed up and the interview had ended. Now she's sitting on the balcony with a beer, her feet in Sakari's lap. He’s thumbing her right instep.

"They released him an hour ago," she says, tiredly. "He knows we'll be watching from now on." 

*You get a warrant for the lab?" 

She shakes her head.

"Not enough of a connection. According to Virtanen," she adds, frowning. Their dead superintendent’s replacement is on her shit list lately. She takes a long pull from her can. 

“Any surveillance on Niska?”

“No,” she says. “They’re afraid of pissing off the bigwigs.” He presses harder, digs into the tense flex of her sole, and her head lolls back. “JP is going to look at Heikkinen’s financial records, but he’s slower than you.”

“Is that you asking me to do it?”

“Do I have to?” she says. Minx. He lets go and dislodges her feet from his thighs. “Hey,” she starts to say, but then he’s getting up and leaning over her to pluck the empty beer can out of her hand. “Oh. Thanks.” He brings back another two cans for them and her laptop, and pulls up the datafiles. “I flagged a couple of things already,” she says and sits up, points at the highlighted entries. He sees why; cash deposits at regular intervals, a few thousand each time. It doesn’t seem to track with his online sales, which are accounted for in the listed payments from the web vendor system. And it’s more money than he might expect for freelance dog training. Smuggling again, maybe? But how could that be running on such a predictable timetable? He scrolls through; the payments start about six months ago, though there are other unusually big deposits here and there going back more than three years, starting right around when Heikkinen got out of prison the last time. There’s something in the pattern that stumps him a little, though: the regular intervals are evenly spaced apart, almost exactly thirty days between them, but they’re not always precisely at the start, middle, or end of every calendar month, nor are they on any kind of biweekly schedule. Thirty days like clockwork, he thinks. The only answer he can come up with for that is ludicrous, fantastical. But so is everything these days. He opens a browser and checks the dates.

“Look at this,” he says, and turns the screen towards Karppi. Her eyebrows lift. “It lines up.”

“That’s a lunar calendar.”

“The payments are always three days after the full moon.”

“That’s crazy,” she says, and he doesn’t disagree. But the more they look at it, the more consistent the pattern is. “So he’s, what… hunting and selling werewolves to somebody? Or just a coincidence?”

“No idea. But if I’m right,” he says, and pulls up the calendar again. Does quick math. “His next payment would be three days from tomorrow.”

“Huh. What about…” she says, and trails off, reaching for the laptop. He turns the screen to her and she scrolls back in the calendar a few weeks. “There,” Karppi says. She taps April eighteenth. “That’s the night Amelia was killed. Twenty-nine days ago.” He stares into the screen. “This is what it’s about,” Karppi says. “This is what everything’s about.”

She texts Peltola a couple of vague notes on the financials while he goes through a couple of the other entries, checking payment sources. Most of the online transactions are small purchases from a variety of buyers, but there’s a second consistent track of smaller biweekly payments from something labeled NirkkoCorp. He looks it up; there’s nothing about it online, just a stub of a webpage with an “under construction” logo and a smiling man in a suit that’s probably a stock photo. A shell corporation, most likely, but he’ll have to do a little more digging.

Karppi orders them all falafel for dinner and picks it up while he stays glued to the laptop. By the time she comes back he’s got a phone number and an office address just outside Helsinki for the well-buried NirkkoCorp. She dials and gets an automated message saying the line is currently out of service. There’s not even a voice mailbox to reach. Karppi tosses her phone back onto the couch and says she’ll check out the address tomorrow with Peltola. “I could check it out tonight,” he says. She gives him an uncertain look.

“If they’re really connected to Heikkinen and Laine then they know about vampires,” she says. “Let me handle it.”

“I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.”

“I know that,” she huffs. “But it’s not just a matter of you getting hurt.” She runs an agitated hand through her hair and only succeeds in messing it up further, like a little golden haystack. He meets her worried eyes. She's obviously still thinking about those cages.

“Okay,” he says.

In bed Karppi yawns widely and then falls asleep in mid-sentence, her hands tucked under her chin and her face soft and slack; he pulls the covers up over her shoulders and then lies next to her for a little while, watching her breath even out and her eyes begin to flicker under the skin as she drops into dreaming. There are dark circles at the top of her fair cheeks, not exactly black eyes but halfway there, leftovers from when Heikkinen punched her. She'd tried to gouge his eyes out in return, that much was obvious. When he thinks about what happened in the barn too long he feels something boiling and horrible rise inside him. He knows what it is: a sincere, almost entirely physical urge to kill. Not an intellectual urge, a wish to inflict due harm in fair measure, but an aching gut-deep animal drive to sink his own long teeth into Heikkinen's neck and rip his trachea out. He's never considered himself an angry person, but maybe he is now. Or maybe he was already and didn't know. He's more used to resignation than anger; he always used to try and flatten himself down, submerge himself, to move past unsightly emotions as quickly as possible. It's not the habit of an entirely healthy man, he knows. But it's so much harder now not to feel things right at the surface in all their complexity, their ferocity. He can't tell if that's the change or her.

Karppi shifts and her hand clenches and unclenches; he slides his fingers under the crook of her arm and she settles again. It's settling for him, too. It's like she could hear him thinking in unhappy circles beside her. Maybe she can. She’s so alive in sleep, in a way he isn’t anymore; his chest doesn’t rise and fall, his heart doesn’t beat. He’s not sure if his eyes move in the REM stage, if he has an REM stage; can he really be said to still have brain function, or is there something beyond the purely physical that animates him? He doesn’t know. But she doesn’t seem to mind any of it. She cuddles around him all the time as if he were a warm, normal man. She’s never acted like his body is strange to her, even though it’s been so strange to him. What kind of creature is she, he wonders, that she can see him and accept him as he is, take him and want him as he is. She has experience already in keeping the dead, he knows. He does, too. Experience thinking to yourself that if they walked back into the room you wouldn't even ask for an explanation. That you would take them however they came, as long as they came back. The feelings don’t turn off like a tap, all at once. Or maybe ever. She still loves Jussi, too. He can see it in the ways she does and doesn't talk about him. It doesn't make him jealous. It shows him what's possible. If a heart is a spring, a well, hers is the kind that can't run dry.

He goes through the financial records again that night and leaves her some notes, then eventually crawls in beside her as the sun is rising. When he wakes up in the afternoon she’s long gone. There are a handful of texts waiting for him. She sent some photos of the interior about three hours ago: a rented space with a couple of dilapidated cubicles but no computers or phones, nothing on the walls but a couple of old posters from the tourist board. She also sent a long string of letters and numbers that doesn’t make any sense to him: VDA1930NKOU772884045G1. But no explanation. Could be fragments of license plates or phone numbers. Could be something else entirely. He puzzles at it and turns the pictures around and around, trying to see what exactly she wanted him to notice about the place.

His phone buzzes. It’s her. “Hey,” he says. The line is silent. He can hear soft, ragged breathing on the other end. “Karppi.” There’s a rustling sound. And then she hangs up. He dials her back and listens to the dialer ring. Finally, it picks up again. The rustling noise is louder. “Karppi,” he says. “Where are you?”

Silence, and then the call ends. Something drops, low in his gut.

He thumbs through quickly to look at his recent calls, his voicemail. There’s nothing else from her. He dials her back and it rings and rings and rings again. It goes to her voicemail eventually. “Call me as soon as you get this,” he says, and hangs up. Paces in a circle around the kitchen, the living room. Reads the texts again. Dials her number. This time he goes directly to voicemail. It’s been turned off. He sets his phone down on the counter and then leans down on it with both palms; his head is swimming. He’s suddenly having some trouble standing up straight. He can’t hyperventilate any more but it feels like he is. He grips the counter hard enough to hurt his hands. Who can he call? Nobody. He’s fucking dead. Focus, he thinks. He looks at the phone screen. It’s only a quarter after two.

He can’t wait for darkness.

Both sets of car keys are still sitting on the table by the door; Peltola must have picked her up. He gets the bag of coveralls out of the closet and then remembers that the back is ruined; he digs a vest out of the closet and slips it on to cover the bloodied tears. He texts Henna to tell her to get Emil from school if she can and then goes down to the back parking lot. The sun is brutally hot but this time he doesn’t feel it; he starts up the car and reverses out of the spot at full speed, whipping around to peel out of the driveway.

The address for NirkkoCorp is the first place he can think of to start. He speeds all the way there, to a crummy-looking office park on top of a hill at the outskirts of Leppävaara. He circles the adjoining parking lots for a minute, looking for Peltola’s white SUV. He doesn’t see it. There’s nobody parked by the low building at the end of the lot, the one that matches up with the address he found. He parks behind it and looks into the dirty windows: it’s the same building Karppi photographed earlier. He walks around to the front door and finds it locked; it’s the work of a second to get it open and then he’s inside in the stale, dusty hall. He breathes in to catch her scent and it’s lingering there faintly in the air, in the short stiff carpet. There’s another scent with her, something chemically sweet: Peltola’s beeswax and honey hand lotion again. They were here together. He walks through the bare offices, checking behind all the closet doors and under the desks. There’s nothing but some old boxes of copy paper, some broken chairs in the conference room, a stained whiteboard with nothing decipherable on it. There’s a map of greater Helsinki sitting unfolded on one desk but no markers or pins in it, and only one pinhole at the top border. There’s a corkboard hanging on the wall over the desk. She stood here for a second, he thinks, smelling the air around himself. Her scent’s strongest here. She stood and looked at the map, hanging on the wall, and took it down for some reason, examined it. He flips it over. The other side of the map is an inset of the downtown area, specifically the waterfront and the port just above Kaivopuisto. He stares into it, understanding nothing. But there’s invisible traces of oil from her hands on it, so he shoves it into his pocket anyway.

He locks the front door behind him as he’s going out, and catches sight of a black SUV and a van starting to climb up the hill towards the office park. They’re nondescript but familiar somehow; when he realizes what he’s looking at he sprints for the car and slides into the driver’s seat and floors it without even buckling his seatbelt. Police vans. Probably driven by people he knows. 

He tears away in the opposite direction, checking his rearview and hoping they won’t follow. He turns the car to move behind other buildings as much as he can, ducking between sheds and warehouses to find another exit to the main roads. He makes it out and down the access road, turns quickly and heads through a small shopping center, weaving through the lanes and then out back by the loading docks, pulling onto another road heading east. He checks the mirror every few seconds. After about ten minutes he’s sure he wasn’t followed. They must have found something, he thinks. Karppi and Peltola. It looked like a forensics van, coming up the hill. So she called somebody else besides him. That’s encouraging, he thinks.

His phone buzzes. He pulls off into the parking lot of a fast-food place and checks it. It’s a text, another photo. This one’s grainy, bluish, and somewhat sideways. It’s a picture of Karppi from the back, angled a little to the side; he recognizes her hair and the curve of her face right away. It takes him a second longer to recognize himself. He’s wearing the bulky coveralls and baseball cap, but it’s a clean profile shot in black and white, fuzzy and lined as if it was taken from a security camera. It’s hard to make out where they’re standing, but then he sees it: the chain-link cage just at the very edge of the image. There were cameras in the barn they didn’t see. They’d been flirting, smiling at each other. Distracted.

While he’s staring into the picture another one pings into the chat and starts to load. It’s him again, his face turned up to the cameras in the parking garage. His fangs and ridges are out. His face is distorted, it’s true. If you didn’t know what a vampire was you might easily think they were two different people. But side by side, if you know exactly what you’re looking for, it’s hard to miss the similarities.

The phone vibrates again in his hand. He’s so numb he barely feels it.

 _How about a deal_ , it says.

He sits in the parking lot of the Kotipizza for what feels like a thousand years. He hasn’t gotten anything else since he texted back _OK_ without hesitation, almost thirty minutes ago. He doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t have a surveillance team. He can’t call someone to track her phone. He doesn’t really even have friends anymore. His whole body feels like it’s caving in on itself.

The phone buzzes. He fumbles it up, startled, and drops it on the floor. When he picks it up he sees it’s just Henna. _WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON_ , it reads. He sets the phone down and stares out the windshield for a while. And then he turns the car back on. One thing at a time. He drives back to Karppi’s place and goes upstairs; he almost strips the coveralls off in the hall before he goes inside but he doesn’t have the energy or the will to do it. When he comes in Henna stalks into the hall from the kitchen, arms folded across her chest.

“What’s going on?” she demands. 

“Where’s Emil?”

“At Noé's,” she says. She looks him over, obviously confused at the coveralls, the half-mask still pulled down under his chin; her brows are knit. “Did you find her?” That takes him aback. How on earth would she know he’s looking for Karppi?

“Huh?”

“What did you do?” she says. “Is this your fault?”

“Henna,” he starts, but she comes up and shoves him in the shoulder with the flat of her hand. He catches her wrist loosely, frowning at her. “Stop. Enough.” She wrenches her arm away and pads out of reach without turning her back on him. “What are you talking about?”

“Peltola called from the hospital. She said their car was run off the road and she was missing—”

“ _What_? When?”

“She asked if anyone called me, and I said no, and she said I should call her right away if I heard anything, and then I asked if she’d talked to you yet, and you know what she said? She said you were dead,” Henna spits. “She thought I was crazy. But I’m not crazy.” Her eyes flash with suspicion, bright and sharp as daggers. “Is this because of you? Did you piss someone off?”

Yes, he thinks. And no.

“It’s a mistake,” he says. “Okay? Just—tell me everything Peltola said. Where were they going?”

“I don’t know.” She frowns. “I’m calling the police.” Her phone’s already in her other hand; she lifts it up and he snatches it out of her fingers in a blink, out of sheer desperation. Henna’s eyes go wide and startled. “Fuck you,” she says.

“I’ll find her,” he says, unevenly. It’s hard to stay calm. “I promise I’ll find her, Henna. Everything will be okay. But you have to tell me everything Peltola told you.”

“Give me my phone back!” she says, and reaches for it. He holds it away. Henna shoves him with both hands and he goes backwards awkwardly into the hall table; coins and keys rattle in the dish. “Give me my fucking phone! You fucking con artist!”

“Henna—”

Henna grabs his wrist and pulls it down in a hard jerk; he’s not trying to fight her at all, he doesn’t want to hurt her. He just holds onto the phone as hard as he can. She twists his arm painfully and tries to pry the phone out of his grip and he squeezes it harder and the phone just—cracks, breaks in two between his fingers. The screen shatters and the casing splits in half and cuts into his hand; blood runs out and little pieces of glass scatter everywhere. He lets go of the crumpled phone and it hits the floor and bounces once with a loud, awful crack. Henna backs off. Her face has gone white. The cut in his palm is deep and ragged. Blood is pooling on the linoleum. “I’m sorry,” he says. His hand is starting to sear a little, like the skin is working to close. He looks down at it. The cut’s already healing. Henna is still just staring at him. He lifts his head and watches her back away slowly. 

“What’s really wrong with you?” she says. He doesn’t have any clue what to say. He feels like his heart is blocking his throat. Henna glances between him and the heavy curtains. When he first came she asked a dozen times about this new sun allergy, teased him, acted like it was a big joke until Karppi snapped at her to stop complaining and went out to buy new lamps. Henna looks back at him now with something wild in her eyes. “I bet it’s nothing. You fucking faker,” she says. Her voice shakes. “You sicko.”

“Please,” he says. He doesn’t even know what he’s asking. 

Henna yanks aside the curtain and the late afternoon sun slashes into the room at a heavy low angle; it touches him where he’s standing and for a second it’s like touching _her_. All his senses are washed clean and blank by daylight, by a pain so close to pleasure that he can’t tell the difference. He stretches his fingers out to get more of it, to get closer. He surrenders. It’s pure instinct. He turns himself up to the sun. Everything falls away. And then he starts to burn.

He comes to as he’s being rolled side-to-side, face down onto the living room carpet; there’s a blanket wrapped around his upper body. He doesn’t remember passing out. There’s a heavy weight on his back and the sound of someone sobbing. He still feels like he’s on fire but he’s pretty sure he’s not. “Henna,” he says, muffled under the fabric. His lips crack from speaking. “Henna, it’s okay. Let me up.” She hesitates, still holding onto his shoulders, and then gets off him. He pulls the fabric away from his burned skin a little, wincing at the way it sticks and catches onto the weave. It turns his stomach and sends hot and cold flares up his limbs. He stays under the blanket for the moment, though, just in case. The backs of his hands, where the sun touched hardest, look they’ve been held against the oven. They’re blackened and blistering. His face feels like shit. But the muscles under the skin don’t feel too badly damaged. He itches all over.

Fucking strange, is what it is. He’ll survive.

“Oh God,” Henna says, muffled but close by him. “Are you okay?” He sits up a little. He can tell now that the room is dark again, the curtains closed, so he pulls the blanket off over his head. There’s still some smoke lingering in the air, and the smell of burnt flesh, meatlike and richly sickening. Henna’s face crumples in horror, seeing him. Her cheeks are damp. “Oh my God,” she says. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.” 

“It’s okay.” He slides over to sit with his back against the couch. Neither of them speak again for a long minute. 

“Are you,” Henna starts. 

“Am I what?” he asks, without looking at her. His face is so stiff, it’ll hurt to turn his head. He just stares at his knees.

“What happened to you?”

“I’m a vampire,” he says. He’s tired of lying. His body feels like a used rag. “Somebody killed me and brought me back like this.” Henna absorbs it, silently. She doesn’t scream or shout or cry anymore. Maybe she’s as exhausted as he is. He expects her to say _don’t be stupid, vampires aren’t real_ , but she doesn’t.

“Does she know?” she says, instead.

“Yes,” he says. “She found me. She’s the only reason I still exist.”

“What happened to the… the other one?”

“I killed it,” he says. “It would have killed us.” He turns his head a fraction at that, to meet her wide and stunned doe’s eyes, but there is something much deeper than fright inside them, something old and sad and recognizable as his own face. He knows, with sudden clarity, what she did. And that she is terrified to ever do it again. He just can’t think about it right now. There isn’t time. “Henna,” he says. “You have to tell me what Peltola said to you.”

“She didn’t tell me anything else,” Henna says. “I don’t know. I was angry, I was barely listening.” He glances into the hall, at the ruined phone still sitting in pieces on the floor. 

“Okay,” he says. He reaches into the front pocket of his coveralls with a brief flare of agony; some of the skin on his fingers rubs off and he oozes down the front of his clothes. Henna looks like she might throw up. He manages to hand her his phone. “Can you call her back? Ask her to meet you here as quick as she can?”

Henna makes the call while he gets himself gingerly out of his coveralls and empties the thermos of blood in the fridge again. He feels a rush of warmth and energy as soon as it’s downed, but he could still use more. Desperation makes him eye the little vacuum-sealed packet of fresh ground beef Karppi bought a couple of days ago. He gives in and eats it in a couple of huge gulps, barely bothering to chew, when Henna’s not looking. Just thinking about doing this would have absolutely made him vomit before, but the taste and texture don’t bother him at all now. It’s actually kind of… delicious. Fuck, he really is a carnivore. By the time Peltola is knocking on the door his skin is knitting together really well; he looks more like he’s been blistering and peeling after a bad sunburn than roasting on a spit. Henna comes into the hall and gives him a double-take before she opens the door. She’s starting to pull herself back together, he thinks. She’s washed her face and pinned back her hair. Karppi must have taught her this; this kind of survivalist’s self-control. He’s watched Karppi put on this same kind of performance more than once.

“Damn,” she says. Her voice only shakes a little. “Look at you. You’re really telling the truth.” He lifts his eyebrows. She shrugs and opens the door and Peltola looks at her, then at him, and freezes for second. There’s a butterfly bandage on her cheek and some bruising starting to bloom around it, probably from the car accident. It’s only a few hours since they were run off the road. She flips her coat open and unholsters her gun.

“Get away from him,” she says to Henna. Henna visibly panics and starts to shut the door on her. “Henna!”

“It’s okay,” he says, and puts his hands up. Backs off. “Peltola, it’s okay.”

“I identified your dead fucking body!” Peltola yells. Oh, he thinks. He didn’t know that part. “It’s not fucking okay!” She pushes forward, driving him and Henna both back into the apartment; the door swings shut behind her. She keeps her gun trained on him but her eyes dart anxiously between them. “Henna, did he bite you? Is he hurting you?”

“What?” he and Henna both shout. “What the fuck,” he says, to Peltola. “Wait, how do you—”

“Gross,” Henna cuts in, with feeling.

“Where’s Karppi?” Peltola demands. “What did you do to her?”

“I called _you_ because _I’m_ trying to find her!” he says. 

“Technically,” Henna says, “I called.” They both swivel to look at her and Henna raises her hands to her shoulders, palms out. “Hey, fuck the both of you! This isn’t helping! Okay, he’s a vampire, whatever,” she says, flippantly, like she wasn’t crying about almost burning him to death twenty minutes ago. It’s bizarrely endearing. Karppi would be proud of her. “He’s been living with us for months already. If he was going to eat us I think he would have.”

“Thanks,” he says, dryly. Henna gives him a flat look. Peltola stares at them like they’re both insane.

“Are you seriously saying… wait, Karppi’s known this whole time?” she says, and her mouth drops open. “Holy shit.” 

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “Can we focus? What happened at NirkkoCorp?” Peltola looks back at him like this is the biggest surprise of all: him following the investigation. Huh, he thinks. He files that reaction away.

“Of course,” she says. “Sure. She always told you everything and me nothing. Why would that ever change.” She hesitates for a long minute and then lowers her gun to her side. She doesn’t holster it yet, but it’s a start. “We went to the offices but there was nothing and nobody there.”

“I saw the pictures,” he says. He thumbs through his texts and shows her the screen. Peltola watches him carefully. 

“Somebody had put an envelope under the door. Recently, she thought. It was the only thing that wasn’t dusty. There was a note inside. But it was just a string of letters and numbers.”

“This?” he interrupts, and shows her. 

“Yeah,” she nods. “I thought it was license plates, maybe. We called it in, JP’s working on it. They were going to send forensics up to the office after we left.” She gives him another keen look. “You probably know that, though, don’t you.” He nods. She sighs and looks around the room. “Mind if I sit? My back is killing me.” She takes a seat on the sofa and Henna sits across from her; he can’t make himself sit right now, he’s buzzing with too much anxiety and juice, between the fresh blood and the fear. He paces in front of the curtains instead, arms folded. “You guys redecorated,” Peltola says. Henna snorts. “So somebody was obviously checking up on the place. When we left a big white truck followed us, and they ran us off the road about two miles down. The car went into a marsh. We were okay, but then a couple of guys in body armor opened the doors and tased us. I banged my head falling and then,” she shrugs. “She was gone. I saw the truck drive off but it didn’t have a license plate. I left some bullet holes in the back fender.” 

Sakari rubs at his forehead.

“Did you take the note?”

“Karppi did,” Peltola says. “It was in an evidence bag in her pocket.” So they have what they really came for, he thinks. 

“They sent me a text with her phone,” he says. “They know what I am. They want to make a deal.”

“What?” Peltola starts. “What did you say?”

“I said okay. But they haven’t messaged back.”

“Okay,” Peltola says, and leans forward onto her elbows. “Christ. So, wait… how do they know about you?”

“Security cameras.”

“Security cameras where?” she says.

“BioTenGen parking garage,” he says, and hesitates. “And in Heikkinen’s barn.” Peltola puts her head in her hands. “Obviously we didn’t see them.”

“She took you to interview somebody,” Peltola says, tiredly. It’s not a question. “You see how crazy this is, right?”

“He tried to kill both of us,” he says. “If she’d been alone he might have succeeded.”

“Yeah,” Peltola says. “Yeah, I get it.” She looks up. “It’s just funny. I used to think you were such a goody-goody.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” she says, and gives him a rueful smile. “You two deserve each other.”

He thinks about that for a second, and then walks away into the bedroom, to where he dropped the coveralls. He digs around in the back pockets and finds the crumpled city map, carries it back into the living room.

“She took this off the wall,” he says. “Right?” Peltola looks at it curiously and then nods. “Why? Did she tell you why?”

“No,” she says. “I don’t know.” 

He turns the map over, stares at the inset section of the waterfront and the port. He is doing exactly what she did: turning the map over and looking at it, with her thumb at the edge. He thinks about her doing it, tries to picture her in his mind. She’s just seen the envelope with the note in it; she would have noticed that right away, sitting untouched by the door. The map was further back, on the wall behind the cubicles. She would have been thinking about the note, the numbers, and staring into this map and seeing…

“The port,” he says. He opens his phone again, stares at the numbers. “This is a cargo container.”

Peltola jumps up and grabs at his phone screen, tilts it towards herself. 

“Shit. Yeah. That second half, at least,” she says. “The part that starts with NKO. I’ll call JP.”

“What’s the first part?”

“I don’t know,” she says. She’s already walking towards the front door, raising her phone to her ear. “We’ll figure it out.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” Peltola says. She looks back at him, her other hand on the doorknob. “I’m not Karppi. I’m not taking you with me. Just tell me right away if you hear anything else. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says. And then she’s gone. He stands in the hallway facing the door. Henna comes up at his side.

“So. A cargo container, huh?” He gives her an incredulous look. Her innocent expression doesn’t fool him. “You need a ride?” 

“You’re joking,” he says. “She’d kill me.”

“You’re already dead,” Henna says.


	7. Chapter 7

The sun won’t set for hours, but his coveralls are a raggedy mess and starting to smell. He reluctantly drops them into the laundry and makes do with a hooded sweatshirt with the drawstring pulled around his head, the cap and mask, sunglasses and driving gloves. It’s not perfect but he looks slightly less like a displaced longshoreman. Now he just looks like an amateur bank robber. 

Despite Henna’s protests he goes down to the car alone, fully intending to drive straight to the cargo port, but his phone buzzes just as he’s reaching the bottom of the stairs. It’s another text from Karppi’s phone, finally. _Vanha maantie 15, come alone 20:45_ , it reads. There’s another one a second later: _don’t call police or try anything, or we kill her_. Like there’s a movie script they checked to make it sound authentic, tough. Like he doesn’t know how this works. He stands at the foot of the staircase for a long minute, reading and re-reading it. His eyes won’t seem to focus right on the last part. It’s barely six right now. Hours until they want to meet. 

OK, he types back. He slides the phone into his jeans pocket, but it buzzes again unexpectedly. He plucks it back out and stares into the screen, uncomprehending, the back of his neck flushing cold and hot. They’ve sent him a thumbs-up emoji.

He is going to tear their fucking heads off and drink from the stumps.

He drives in idle circles for a while, avoiding both the areas around BioTenGen and the port, even though he longs to be out hunting for her scent between the cargo containers. The problem is he has no idea where they might actually be holding her. The lab’s too obvious, the port’s too much of a labyrinth. Niska has some kind of lake cottage, supposedly, but it’ll take him too far out from the city, and anyway it’s bound to be wired for security cameras. Heikkinen’s farm was combed over by forensics, but who knows if they left anyone there to watch it? Too many variables, too many possibilities. He needs to stay calm and wait this out, and hope that Peltola finds something. There’s a gravel lot on Rajasaari they used to drive to sometimes when they needed to sit and think uninterrupted and look out at the water; he goes there now and parks and watches the slow monotonous roll of the waves, light glittering off the minute peaks and ripples almost painfully. Eventually he dials Peltola.

“Yeah?” she says. She sounds muffled, like she’s talking through or into her hands. “Anything new?” He tells her about the messages and the meeting, says he’ll text her the address. “You’re going? Alone?” He doesn’t bother dignifying that with an answer. He has no choice. “Fuck,” she says, tersely. “Fine. It’s not like I can send a car anyway. How would I explain?” 

“You get any more on the numbers?”

“Arrival time and berth,” she says. “Looks like it came in yesterday night. We’re talking to the port guys right now but supposedly this container didn’t show up on the manifest, so they don’t have an exact location for it.”

“Okay,” he says, rubbing at his temple. How is it possible that he has a headache? Do his blood vessels still constrict with tension? Is it psychosomatic? He’s checked the internet, it’s less than helpful on vampire physiology. “You guys still on Laine?”

“Yeah,” she says. “He was at the lab eleven to four and now he’s in his flat eating soup, according to surveillance.”

“Keep them on his back,” he says. “He’s part of whatever’s happening tonight.”

“What _is_ happening tonight?” Peltola says. “Karppi didn’t tell me much about what the two of you were into. I mean, I can guess now,” she adds. “And I’m sure I’m not going to like it.”

“You won’t,” he says. But he gives her the gist of it, just in case. Like earlier, in the apartment, she's remarkably calm about the idea of vampires and werewolves, and much more upset by the idea of vampires and werewolves being experimented on. Which leads him to an almost inevitable conclusion: he’s not the first vampire she’s ever heard of. It sets his mind whirling, but it’s yet another thing he doesn’t have time for right now.

After they hang up he sits for a while, thinking, and then drives back over the bridge and through Laakso, loops through Karppi’s neighborhood to stop at the butcher’s. It’s a family place, quiet and unhurried. They know him and Karppi by now; if they’re surprised to see him in the shop during daylight hours, and wearing a mask pulled around his chin, they don’t mention it. Maybe they have other clients like him. Is Helsinki secretly crowded with monsters? Maybe he was just oblivious all these years. He buys a couple of quarts of blood and asks if he can borrow a cooler and icepacks from them. They blink but then hand over a tote-sized cooler and some freezer gel-packs without comment. He promises he’ll return them tomorrow. He drinks about a pint and a half in the car and then stashes the rest of the blood in the trunk. The extra blood settles in his limbs, wakes him fully, sharpens his senses just a touch. He hopes he won’t need more tonight, but it’s better to be prepared if things get out of hand. There won’t necessarily be a convenient tiger this time.

The address they gave him is for a lot at the back of an office park; he pulls in and parks behind the shade of the trees, in a spot that gives him a good view of the single driveway. He drums his fingers on his thighs. His body is close to vibrating. If they’ve done anything to her, if he smells her blood on their clothes, he’s not sure he won’t kill them. He’ll try not to. It’s not good, having this much time to dwell on it. He tries to think about something else, but the problem is there’s nothing else to think about: he doesn’t have work to cycle through, he’s not planning a vacation, it’s better if he doesn’t wonder what his old friends are up to this coming weekend. He doesn’t follow any sports except the Olympics and it’s an off-year. He doesn’t have family. He could worry about Karppi’s kids, about the cloud following Henna around, but that just brings him back to worrying about Karppi. His life right now is primarily an orbit. If something happens to the planet he’s circling he really will be a dead man.

Headlights flash against the shadow he’s sitting in; a white van is pulling into the lot. He watches them come, feels his fangs ache inside his jaws. Holds them in, for now.

He gets out of the car and stand by it, waiting. Two guys in kevlar vests and dark cargo pants and balaclavas get out of the van and walk towards him. They’re about his same height but both stockier than him. One of them, the slightly shorter one, walks quick and sharp like ex-military. The other one walks like he’s an extra in the background of an old American cowboy movie. They’ve got spray canisters clipped to their belts and the taller one with the swaggering gait is carrying a cattle prod. They smell a little bit like blood, oddly: oddly because he thinks it might be their own. But neither of them are badly wounded that he can tell. They notice him looking; the guy with the cattle prod holds it up and sparks it a couple of times, blue light crackling across the tip.

“You’d think it might not work on vampires,” the guy says. “But it does.” 

“Here,” the other guy says, and tosses him a piece of fabric. Sakari plucks it out of the air, letting his heightened speed show through the gesture. Just a little. He hears their heartbeats tick up a fraction. Good. The cloth they gave him is really a black canvas hood with a drawstring at the bottom. “Put this on.”

“Your van doesn’t have windows,” Sakari says. 

“Just put the fucking mask on,” the guy repeats. Sakari sighs and starts to lift it over his head, but then Cattle Prod sticks a hand out. 

“Wait,” he says. He turns his palm up. “Phone.” Sakari gives him a flat stare. “Phone,” he repeats.

“You give us the phone or—”

“I’ll leave it in the car,” Sakari says. “Okay?” He pulls the phone out of his pocket and holds it up, both hands raised, placatingly. Cattle Prod and his buddy look at each other and then they nod, and Sakari unlocks the passenger door, pretends to be fumbling with the glove compartment. There’s only a brief second to do anything, and he’s stumped as to what else he can try: as a last resort he pings Henna the car’s location, straight to her email; her phone is lying in pieces on the hallway floor, so who knows if she’ll even see it. It’s all he has time for before they’re complaining and telling him to move it, making more threats. He shuts the compartment and locks the door and pockets his keys, and then one of them is coming forward to grab him by the shoulder and start fumbling him towards the van. They pop the bag over his head, not gently, and tie the drawstring around his neck; they push him forward and he bangs his knees against the van’s back gate. One of them pulls his arms behind him and zip-ties his wrists together. They get him up into the back and shut the doors and then he’s in total darkness, sitting on the floor with his shoulder to the side. The zip ties cut at his skin. He shuffles his legs around a little, touching and prodding whatever’s back here with him: there are some hand tools and rope and crates on the floor around him, nothing he can specifically identify. The smell inside the van is antiseptic, plastic, but there’s traces of blood and spit and sweat that he can still pick out in the grooves, layers and layers deep. None of it is hers. It doesn’t tell him anything; only that she wasn’t here.

They pull quickly out of the parking lot, fast enough that he slides backwards and thuds against the locked double doors with a loud thump. He can hear them laughing under their breath up front, through the divider. He stretches out his senses as best he can; listens for the changing sounds of road beneath him, the hiss of cars passing on the highway and the fainter ticks as they cross over the raised street markings. They turn so many times he loses track. After a while he realizes it’s pointless. He can’t tell where they’re going, only that they’re winding around a bunch of plazas and roads, populated places. They’re not driving him into the countryside, he doesn’t think. The city noise and traffic sounds keep coming. So maybe this rules out Heikkinen’s farm and Niska’s cottage. 

It’s a long ride. He tries to keep track but after about twenty or thirty minutes it’s hard to tell how long it’s been. An hour, maybe. Maybe a little longer. If they’re trying to confuse his senses, it’s working. 

Finally they pull over, off the side of the road, and drive on gravel for a little bit. They stop and the engine idles while one of them gets out; he hears a clinking sound like a chain being pulled, and then the whine of what he thinks is a metal gate sliding open. They pull forward and then the process repeats on the other side: whine, clink. The sound of a padlock being snapped into place. And a deep reverberation of the engine, drumming against walls. The air around the van hums. They’ve driven into a building or a shelter, maybe even an underpass. They drive down along inside and he revises his guess: very definitely a tunnel, from the length of it. They’re underground or in some kind of deep parking garage. Something in him is ticklingly aware of the space beneath and above him, suddenly: like he can sense himself at a distance, dipping below some kind of physical or metaphysical line in the earth. He was never buried, but Karppi did keep him belowground for a night and a day before he awoke. The nocturnal animal side of him is murmuring, awake. It’s incredibly strange to still know where he is, at least his relative position, with a bag over his head. 

Finally they cut the engine. They get out; he can hear them pacing around for a while before they open the back doors. They grab his legs and start to drag him out until he rolls over and pushes up on his knees, then hops down out of the van. They grab him by the shoulders and plod him forward. There are flickers of orange light here and there, visible through the canvas: the tone of them is like construction lighting, like the big halo lamps they used to light unfinished passages. He wonders if he’s in one of the blast tunnels for that fucking underwater connector rail again. If so, and if they’ve brought Karppi to the same place, she’s having the same frustrated déjà vu. It’s the first thought that actually touches him in a while, wondering what she’s thinking. 

It’s a surprisingly long walk, up a few short metal staircases and down a long brighter concrete hallway, but finally they stop him in front of a door, open it, step him through a room and then another. And then one of them holds onto his bound arms while the other one grunts and heaves something; there’s a strange spinning noise and then a rush and pop of air. They shove him through another door and yank the hood off. 

“Hello again,” Laine says, cheerfully.

He’s in a white coat, goggles, and latex gloves to his elbows. They’re in a lab about as big as a large conference room, with gurneys, spotlights, and banks of monitoring equipment along the wall. The spinning sound was the massive door, styled like a bank vault, that seals off the lab from the outer room, visible through a thick plexiglass window on the far side. On this end there are a couple of small refrigerators with racks of test tubes inside and glass containers of other things that are cloudy and pinkish and indistinct. He can’t tell what all of them are, but he can clearly see at least one halved brain, at least one overlarge heart. The room stinks overpoweringly of bleach and blood and piss. And by inference, terror. “These two didn’t give you any trouble, I hope,” Laine says, like they’re old friends. Sakari doesn’t say anything, and after a second Laine frowns and says, “On the table,” but not to him. He’s shoved forward and the zip-tie is cut, freeing his hands. For a split-second he thinks that he should kill all three of them right now. It might be possible. “Ah,” says Laine, reading his face. “I wouldn’t.” He rummages in his pocket; holds up Karppi’s phone.

Sakari looks at him, then sits on the table and swings his legs up. The guys in balaclavas fasten his wrists down with thick leather cuffs and then back off, standing with their arms crossed in front of the vault door. 

“You want us to stay?” one of them says. Laine turns a baleful glance on him.

“Uh, _yeah_ ,” he says, shortly. “And keep the tasers handy.” He looks at Sakari. “Silver’s too messy for what I have in mind.”

Laine preps a syringe and takes a sample of blood from Sakari’s inner arm, humming to himself as he works. He eyedroppers a little blood onto a slide and puts it underneath a microscope on the counter. “Wonderful,” he murmurs. “Just spectacular.” Sakari stares into the drop-ceiling, layered with acoustical tiles. Someone spent a lot of time making sure no sound, and no people, could get out of this room if they weren’t meant to. “Okay,” Laine says, and rolls his chair back to the side of the gurney. “I have a proposition for you.”

Sakari meets his eyes.

“I’ve got one for you too,” he says. Laine’s face goes red for a second, and then he recovers and laughs like it’s a great joke.

“You’re going to need a sense of humor for this,” he says. “So here’s what I propose. I have a very simple job for you tonight. You listen to me, you do as I say—exactly as I say—and your girlfriend gets to live. You fight me, you make things difficult, and I will remove her heart myself and feed it to you. Obviously I’m going to kill you when it’s over,” Laine adds. “But the real question is, do I also kill her? And that’s up to you.” Sakari is listening, but there’s no uptick in his pulse, no hiccup, no sign of a bluff or a lie. He feels like a smothered fire, burning coldly blue and numb. “Got it?”

“Got it,” Sakari echoes, hoarsely. Laine smiles. 

“Great,” he says. He leans back and raps on the plexiglass window. The two guys in kevlar scurry to start opening the door, backs heaving as they turn the wheel.

“What’s the job?” 

“He’s the job,” Laine says, and the vault door pops open. Arvo Niska is on the other side, incongruously dressed in a neat, expensive suit. Even at this distance Sakari can smell the cancer eating at him, a rich sweet smell beneath his normal human musk; a scent that’s not ugly or rotten, merely foreign. But there’s something else infinitely worse lingering around him like a miasma. It’s hard to say what it is exactly, but it’s a smell of putrefaction, and also somehow of violence: it smells the way a spreading purple bruise looks and feels. The physical experience of inhaling it is like sticking a knife up his nostrils. Sakari’s head jerks back and his eyes sting and bloody themselves, running small rivulets down his cheeks. Laine looks between the two of them and makes a thoughtful face. “Huh,” he says. “You can tell.”

“This is him?” Niska says, from between his pinched, slightly skeletal lips. His skin is papery and almost translucent. He comes forward and bends over Sakari and makes an expression like he’s examining the packets at a meat counter. “I want to see the fangs,” he says, petulantly. Laine prods Sakari in the ribs and Sakari shoots him a hateful look and then lets his fangs out the way they’ve been longing to anyway, lets them carve their way out of his face, lets his ridges rise. His mouth opens in a yawning grimace and his fangs elongate painfully, pleasurably. The two masked idiots by the door both step back a fraction, but Laine and Niska lean closer with delight. They want a monster, he thinks, they can have one. Just wait. “Oh, just great,” Niska says. “Top quality, I can tell. How old was your sire?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, make a guess.”

“I have no idea,” Sakari says. “He burned slow, if that means anything.” 

Niska frowns.

“Well, if he’s the best we can do,” he says, and sighs. He sits on the gurney next to Sakari’s and starts slipping out of his jacket.

“What is this,” Sakari says. “What do you want from me?”

“Dear boy,” Niska says, grinning. “You’re going to turn me. I thought you already knew.” Sakari feels himself freeze, like a car is coming down the hill. He is a deer in the road. All he can do is stare at it, watch it coming.

“They were late,” Laine says, and gestures at the others. “I’m still catching him up.”

“No,” Sakari says, interrupting them. He chokes on the word, on his horror; his fangs slide back away instinctually and his eyes are welling up, against his control. His chest aches. 

“No, what?”

“No,” he says. He turns his face away.

“It’s an honor to turn someone,” Niska says. “Look, I know vampires. I understand your kind. You and I, this will make us friends. Brothers, basically.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Sakari says.

Laine gets up and walks across the room and comes back with one of the long cattle prods; he presses it grimly and unceremoniously to Sakari’s leg and his nervous system lights up like a house ablaze, bright lights flare and die in every room of his body. The pain and the voltage shake him like a leaf, like a branch in the wind throwing snow into the air. He clenches his mouth to keep from screaming and only makes a hard grunting noise instead. Laine does it again and he cries out and seizes and then drops back boneless and still sizzling onto the gurney. His nerves are sparking up and down the length of him, like firecrackers under his skin. His skull pounds. 

“I can do this to her instead, if you want,” Laine says. “Will you turn him?” Sakari looks at him and tries to open his mouth and it can’t come out, the _yes_ he means to say; the pain still stings him and his throat closes for a second and he just gapes at them, open-mouthed and helpless and screaming inside at himself to do something, to do anything. Will he turn a human being? Will he empty their body and violate it and give them this—this, whatever this is, this half-life, will he eat and swallow their soul? Will he force himself down their throat? It’s obscene. He would rather die. But it’s not his life at stake. He clears his throat. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Laine says, cutting him off. He looks at the guards. “Go get her.”

“No, yes,” Sakari yells, and yanks at the cuffs, sitting up halfway. “Yes, I’ll do it. Fine. I’ll do it.”

“I know you will,” Laine says, turning to the counter and starting to shuffle some slides back into a box. “I’m just in a hurry, here.” Sakari jerks at the cuffs and his fangs leap forward again, along with something terrible inside him, something as sweeping as a moving wave. It’s himself, he realizes. It’s the thing he is, battering at the walls of the man he’s trying to be. He might as well let it out. A rumbling noise starts in his throat, not loud enough to hear but loud enough to feel, like a tide coming in, like the sea is rising in his body, inexorable and freezing.

“Look at me,” Sakari hisses, from his gut, and Laine’s head jerks up swiftly and then wobbles for a second on his neck, as if the response was involuntary. Sakari’s voice is strange suddenly, even to his own ears. “I said I’ll do it,” he says, carefully, low: the vibration in his body is rippling through his voice, and for a second Laine can’t tear his eyes away, can’t even blink. His hand shakes. “You don’t need her.”

Laine swallows. 

“He said he’ll do it, Paavo, don’t be unreasonable,” Niska says, almost obliviously, still meticulously rolling up his cuffs. It breaks the spell, the tension; Laine’s shoulders sag. Laine’s not facing his boss, so only Sakari sees the flare of anger on his face for a second before he shoves it away and turns back with a blankly pleasant expression. “It’s a big decision, siring somebody. You have to let him breathe,” he says, and looks down at Sakari with an absently benevolent smile. “Not literally, of course.” The fucker actually winks.

“The vampire whisperer,” Laine says, from between his clenched teeth. “Of course, sir, I have a little more technical expertise here.”

“Oh sure, sure,” Niska says.

The wheel on the vault door spins again; Sakari’s eyes flick to it with a strange anticipation, his body tenses. In the second that the door is opening, before he sees her, he smells her, senses her with all his scent-starved, longing being: it’s like falling face-first into wildflowers, as engulfing and narcotic as poppies. His head lifts and his dead lungs fill themselves on her and he throbs with the sound of her heartbeat in his ears, alive, alive, alive. For a second nothing else matters. They could be in hell and he would still feel like this: like spring is come. The door thuds open and Karppi is pushed in. Her hands are bound and her coat is torn and there’s a bag over her face, and her feet stumble a little as she’s thrust forward, but when he lifts his head and opens his mouth to speak, Karppi’s head turns his way. It’s probably not possible, but he can feel her looking at him, right at him. He looks at her and thinks what he feels at her with everything inside of him, the bright and the dark. 

“Karppi,” he says, low, and she takes a step forward in his direction, like there’s a string tied between them, taut and strong.

“Hold her, please,” Laine says, and the guards pull her back into the corner with their hands looped under her arms, jerking her away. Karppi drags at them and Cattle Prod pulls a gun out of the back of his pants and points it at her temple, up against the bag, until she recognizes it and goes still. “I said _hold_ her,” Laine says, rolling his eyes. “How quickly they forget.” He looks at Sakari. “She knocked their heads together pretty good earlier. Amateur hour. You get what you pay for, I guess.”

“You want to try this without us?” Cattle Prod says. “We can walk away anytime.”

“Relax, you’ll get a bonus,” Laine says. “Contractors.” While he fusses with a tray of surgical tubing and gets Niska settled onto the gurney, Sakari watches Karppi. Her head tilts here and there, listening, and then settles back towards him again, facing him steadily for a long moment.

“You’re not trafficking werewolves, are you,” Karppi says, a little smothered by the hood, and Laine glances up. “You’re making them. Once a month.”

“Now you want to talk,” he says. Karppi lifts her bound hands, as if in a shrug. “Sure,” Laine grins. “Why hunt when you can cultivate?”

“That’s what Amelia found out.”

“Oh, Amelia,” Laine says. He rests a hand briefly over his heart. “Beautiful Amelia. Oh Paavo, imagine meeting you here! My sister spoke so highly of you,” he says, raising his voice to falsetto. “Oh, Paavo, I must have taken your key card by accident! I'm such a scatterbrain!" He shakes his head. “It was a good try. You know, she’d have made a great werewolf. Her sister did. Too bad it doesn’t always take.”

“What does that mean?” Karppi says.

“It means, it’s not a given. You can’t always make a werewolf, or a vampire for that matter,” he says, and swivels to look at Sakari, “out of a human being. It’s a crapshoot. Some people change, and other people just die.”

“The strong survive,” Niska says. “That’s the law of the jungle. And of business.” He’s unbuttoned his dress shirt, revealing the discoloration on the skin of his chest, the blue veins creeping sluggishly up towards his neck. 

“Of course,” Laine says. For a second he meets Sakari’s eyes; there’s something blandly amused in them, before he blinks. “There’s a science to it, finding the right subjects.”

“You’re monsters,” Sakari says. Niska’s face screws up angrily; it’s the first truly vivid emotion he’s showed since he walked through the door.

“We are pioneers!” he spits. “We are walking far out on the edge so that others may follow. We are going to save millions of lives. Millions. The discoveries we’ve made will extend life for generations. Change the way we exist.” He points a finger in Sakari’s face; his mouth is spraying tiny flecks of spittle. “You’re not even alive,” he says. “I’m supposed to lose sleep over… lab rats? I don’t.” He draws himself back, pulls himself together a little. He’s overexerted his body, obviously. “You’re part of something much bigger than yourself,” he says, more calmly. “They all are. They should be grateful to have a purpose. Instead of feeding off humanity, they’re saving it.”

“Chloe wasn’t grateful,” Karppi says, from the corner. 

“Okay,” Laine says. He slides the tray table out and locks it next to Niska’s gurney. “As much as I’ve enjoyed the chit-chat, let’s get to it.”

He unbuckles Sakari’s cuffs and lets him sit up; Sakari rubs his wrists and keeps his eyes trained on the corner, where Cattle Prod is still holding a gun to Karppi’s head. Laine looks at him, and then at Cattle Prod. “Good,” he says. “I can spare you the lecture about consequences.”

Niska is lying in his undershirt with his arm strapped lightly out to one side, extending out past the gurney. He’s got heart monitors taped to his chest, more monitors stuck to his fingers on the other hand, and an IV bag of something white and viscous. Sakari steps off the gurney and pads towards him on the concrete floor; his body recoils at the smell again when he gets closer. Niska smells like a real corpse; the faint trace of the cancer is nothing compared to whatever is causing this. Sakari opens his fangs and hesitates above the stringy meat of his forearm. The truth is, he has no idea what to do. He’s never turned anyone. His hesitation must show, because Laine frowns and says, “First time?” Sakari actually growls. It surprises them both; Laine jumps a fraction in his shoes. “Figure it out,” he snaps.

Sakari lowers his face to Niska’s arm and—bites, hard. Latches on with all four teeth. Niska groans. Blood spurts into his mouth, hot and putrid somehow; it hits the back of his throat and he gags on the burnt-metal taste of it. He lets go and leans forward and pukes a mouthful across the floor at his feet. The spray is thin and blackish-red. 

“What the fuck,” Sakari says, and wipes at his mouth. “This is poison.”

“Do it,” Laine says. “Do it now.” Cattle Prod cocks the hammer back on the gun.

They’re going to kill us both anyway, Sakari thinks. There’s no way they’re letting Karppi walk out of here; Laine as good as confessed in front of her. He has to figure this out, or give her time to figure it out. He doesn’t have another option at the moment, so he puts his face back down to Niska’s arm and buries his teeth in the meat of him, over the biggest veins, and tears a hole to suck at.

“Ah, Jesus!” Niska cries, and thrashes a little.

“It’ll be over in a second,” Laine says. There’s a hint of enjoyment in his voice. “You’ll heal.”

Sakari drinks him without any more hesitation; lets his conscious thought go blank and his body take over. The blood is dangerously rotten but it’s still blood and his animal side wants it mindlessly, greedily. He sucks and pumps the arm a little to press more of it out, faster. He didn’t know how to do that before he started doing it. Instinct has taken over. From time to time he gags again on the taste of the blood and has to spit some out on the floor. The stain around his feet grows bigger and bigger; the bottoms of his jeans are soaked with Niska’s fetid blood. Niska’s heart is starting to slow. His body is twitching sluggishly on the gurney. His eyes are closed now; the pain’s gone from his face. His expression is almost rapturous, anticipatory. The monitors blink. His pulse is going erratic. Laine goes around to the other side of the gurney and adjusts the white IV drip. Sakari takes another mouthful and as he swallows he stretches himself out to the room, listens to the heartbeats around him in a small cacophony: hers is clear and strong and familiar; the two guards are elevated from watching him eat; Laine’s is even and Niska’s is dropping rapidly into a faint slow tap. He’s fading. In a second he’ll flatline. Sakari’s overcome by an urge to tear at his own arm and shove it into Niska’s mouth; he realizes only as he’s lifting his head and starting to latch fangs onto himself that this is it. This is how it’s done: the turning. He did know, after all. He is viruslike, instinctual. Eager to replicate. 

He looks up.

“I’m ready,” he says, in Laine’s direction. Over Laine’s shoulder, he can feel Karppi tense, her heart tick up a fraction. “This is it.”

“Get on with it,” Laine says.

“On three,” Sakari says. One, he thinks, and sinks his fangs into his own arm. Two; he pulls them out and bright blood rolls down his wrist to his palm. Three. He swings down with every ounce of his real speed, inhumanly quick, and yanks upwards with everything he has. It flips the gurney clean into the air. Across the room at the same moment Karppi pushes the gun away from her head and drops to the floor in one quick sweep. The gun goes off and the scent of fresher human blood rips into his senses, but it’s not hers. The gurney careens and Niska’s body flails over and the weight of it comes crashing down on top of Laine. Laine barely has time to scream before the gurney hits him full-on, toppling him in a twist of limbs and metal and tangling him in IV tubing. Sakari looks up: Karppi’s up again, wrestling the gun out of the hand of Cattle Prod, bag still partly over her head. The other one is staggering sideways, blood spurting from his shoulder, pulling out his taser. Sakari comes up behind him and grabs his head in both hands, twists it brutally fast. The spine snaps with a tearing sound and the body jerks and drops to the floor. There’s a gunshot: Karppi standing over the other guard now, bag pulled up over her forehead. Cattle Prod cries out and scoots away, leaving a smear of blood on the floor from his leg. He pants and lies on the floor with his hands up to his shoulders, surrendering.

“Please,” he says. “Oh please, I just work for these guys, please don’t.”

Laine is struggling up from under the gurney; he shoves Niska’s limp body away and kicks free of the gurney’s mattress and then glances up. Sakari sees his eyes widen as he takes in the two of them: Karppi with the gun in her hand and him like a slaughtered pig, red and black from mouth to knees. Laine doesn’t bother to say anything, for once. His face is sick.

“Tie them up,” Karppi says, and Sakari does it.

Sakari ties a clean rag off around the guard’s leg wound and then tapes his wrists and ankles together firmly while Karppi keeps the gun trained on Laine; he does the same to Laine afterwards, but tapes his mouth shut, too. He heaves the gurney over with Niska’s body still tied down on it, puts a finger to Niska’s throat. Look at the monitors, some of which are still attached. 

“He’s gone,” he says, to Karppi. She chews her lip, thinking.

“My phone?”

“Oh,” he says. “I got it.” He kneels over Laine and shoves him sideways onto his face, digs in his lab coat pocket, fishes Karppi’s phone out. He toes Laine over again with one foot while Laine squeals under the tape, and hands the phone over to her. Her mouth quirks a smile at him, but then frowns as she thumbs over her screen.

“There’s no reception down here,” she says. They glance at Laine and Cattle Prod, propped against the wall and trussed like turkeys, and then at the vault door.

They seal them into the room and lock it and go out into the outer chamber, another lab with desks and processing equipment and a huge bank of video monitors. There’s an output on one screen still tracking Niska’s flat vitals. Karppi notices a clipboard with a stack of charts on it, flips curiously through the pages. “Some kind of assessment forms,” she says. “F29, M43.” She holds it out to him. “Sex and age? I think these are all people.” He takes it from her and looks it over, rubbing at his chest. He’s nauseous still; his body feels like it can’t settle down. “You alright?” Karppi says, and he looks up to meet her eyes. There are still circles under hers. He sets the clipboard down and reaches for her and she folds herself into him and wraps her arms around his middle, suddenly breathing hard and clutching at his back. He buries his face into her hair and presses a hard kiss to her curls, fingers spanning the back of her head, his own head spinning a little.

“You’re okay?” he says, soft, into her ear. She nods against him. “Okay,” he says, and holds her tighter. They stand like that for a long minute and he inhales her, dizzy at the proximity. And also just dizzy. One of his legs trembles and she grips him, keeps him upright. 

“What’s wrong?” she says.

“Niska’s blood,” he says. “There was something off about it. I think he—”

He’s cut off by a crashing noise from the inner room. Cattle Prod is screaming. They go for the plexiglass window and something crashes up against it: one of the big monitor screens. It breaks and shatters against the window and the window bows and vibrates but holds. “What the fuck,” Sakari breathes. Niska is—standing up.

There are dark veins rising out from his skin, pulsating; his body is stretching upwards, the muscles twisting horribly. He looks taller, somehow. Cattle Prod is screaming and wriggling himself backwards, trying to push Laine in front of himself. Niska’s face is cracking and splitting in a horrible rictus grin, lengthening like a werewolf’s, but also not like that at all; he catches sight of Karppi and Sakari watching through the plexi and smiles at them both. He tears the last IV tube out of his arm and opens his lips wide to show them a row of a dozen jagged fangs. Tilts his head back. And roars. The sound rattles the room inside and outside, down to Sakari’s bones.

Niska leaps and lands on Laine and swings his arm back; the fingers are horribly clawed. He arcs down and blood sprays across the plexiglass. Karppi’s hurriedly fumbling with her phone. 

“I can’t get anything,” she says, white-faced. They watch through the glass, frozen in horror as Niska’s long muzzle rips into Laine’s chest with a cracking sound and yanks out strings of raw, red flesh. Cattle Prod is screaming, rolling across the floor towards the door. “Fuck,” Karppi says, and heads for the vault lock. She starts spinning the wheel. Sakari leaps after her and helps her, spinning faster, and they crack the door a fraction. Karppi keeps the gun up and aimed while he crawls in and scoops the guard up from under his shoulders, drags him out. The guy’s crying and there’s a rank urine smell coming from his pants. Niska’s still busy tearing at Laine, but he lifts his gorey snout and smells the air and smiles in their direction again, wickedly. Sakari tosses the guard aside, into the outer room, and they both heave themselves against the door just in time for Niska to throw himself bodily at it. They strain, backs against the door and heels scrabbling on the concrete, and Karppi just barely manages to twist the lock into place; they spin the vault mechanism wildly and then back away from the door. Niska hammers on it and the door frame shakes, but doesn’t give. There’s another hit or two, and then an eerie silence.

“Thank you,” the guard whispers. “Oh my God, thank you. Oh God, oh God.”

“Can he open the door?” Karppi says.

“I don’t know,” Sakari says. “I think it locks on this side.”

Another monitor crashes against the window. Followed by what looks like one of Laine’s legs. The lock may not actually matter, he thinks.

They cut the tape on the guard and Sakari heaves his arm over his own shoulders; the three of them go out the door and make for the tunnels, hop-skipping the guard between them on his good leg. It’s a ways back, down the metal stairs and through long corridors, and the going is too slow for comfort. While they run, Cattle Prod apologizes for kidnapping both of them. “No offense,” Sakari says. “But shut the fuck up.” They’re almost to the mouth of the tunnel, in sight of the white van, when a crashing sound echoes out from the far opposite end of the corridor. It’s followed by a long screaming roar that’s high and joyous, ringing in Sakari’s ears; it sounds faint and distant for now, but not faint and distant enough. “Go, go, come on,” he says, and pushes the guard faster. They get him into the back of the van, where he curls into a ball. “Keys,” Sakari demands. “Where are your keys?”

“Carl had them,” he says, pathetically.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Sakari shouts, and shuts the door in his face. He fists his hands in his hair. Karppi is climbing into the driver’s seat, pulling down the rearview mirror, tearing apart the cupholders and glove compartment.

“There’s nothing!” she calls. She comes back out, wild-eyed. “We have to run.” Sakari opens the back doors and helps the guard into her arms, and the two of them start sprinting clumsily for the gate. Sakari rummages in the back of the van and finds bolt cutters; he runs a little ahead of them and clips the chain, shoves the gate open just as they reach it. He swings the gate closed behind them, wedges the bar of the bolt cutters into the bars of the gate and then yanks with all his might, popping fangs and hissing between his teeth. Somehow he manages to bend the handle of the cutters and the bars together, just a fraction, at the right angle. Just enough that they catch and hold the gate shut. He rattles the gate to check, but it sticks firm. When Niska pushes on it from the opposite side it’ll only stick it shut harder. He glances back at Karppi, shuffling the guard towards the road beyond. It’s night now, almost fully. The sun has sunk below the skyline; there’s just a pale purple afterimage left at the furthest edge of the land. Sakari can smell the water, close by. They’re near the harbor after all.

Karppi looks back at him. “Come on!” she yells.

“I’m coming,” he says. “Go on!” He looks back down into the true dark of the tunnel. Senses it coming closer, the pulsing dead-alive heart and thickened veins, the rage and glee and evil. It’s connected to him, somehow. He can feel it. The thing he helped somehow to make. If he can feel it, it can feel him, he thinks.

He catches up to Karppi at the end of the gravel lot, where there’s an access road running along a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence is a maze of cargo containers. Somewhere in there is probably a police unit scanning the numbers. Hopefully Karppi will find them before Niska does. “We have to split up,” he says. Karppi looks at him. “Find somewhere to hide. Call Peltola.”

“What are you going to do?” 

“It’s,” he says, and rubs at his chest again. He still feels seasick. “It’ll follow me, I think. No. I know it will.” Karppi frowns. “Please,” he says. “Go.”

She lets the guard go for a second and he staggers onto his bad leg; she ignores him and pulls Sakari in for a kiss. His mouth and face are smeared with black blood. He must taste like shit, but she kisses him like it’s their first time, with desperation and longing and grief, and with something fiercer, something purer and deeper, molten and radiant as dawn. She kisses him hard and then she lets him go.

“Come back to me,” she says. It’s a command. Maybe this is what she said to wake him, when he died. Laine said the turning doesn’t always take. Maybe this is what she did, how she called him back, to give him his second life. To make him hers, and hers forever. “Come back,” Karppi says.

 _Always_ , he thinks, and turns to run.


	8. Chapter 8

He watches Karppi and the guard leg it out of sight, towards the lit-up area by the cargo crane and the operator’s booths at the far end, then goes in the opposite direction, headed for the water. There's a break in the fence not far from the gate, where a pole's been knocked down and left in disrepair. He pries the gap wider and creeps through it, and heads for the tall aisles of cargo containers, stacked two or three high and stretching on for at least a mile. He jogs down a side aisle, not bothering to hurry or to zig-zag. He doesn't really want to cover his tracks. He stops once or twice to smear a bloody mark on the side of a container, here and there. The scent of his blood mingled with Niska's is stinging and strong, a trail of brighter copper and heavier iron. He hopes it's enough to attract his attention away from Karppi.

There's a clanging sound from not too far away: the door of a cargo container being kicked open or shut. Niska’s taking his bait.

Sakari lopes quietly into a turn and then backtracks a little in a different aisle, jumps up to catch the edge of a container roof. He pulls himself up and climbs to the top level, then walks lightly and carefully to the corner to watch along the main aisle. His limbs burn a little from the exertion, a little more than they should; the black blood is making him tired, somehow. Tired and queasy. There's a shadow running between the containers, quick as a blink. Quicker than him, even. It scurries out of sight and he runs along the rise of the stacked containers to try and keep pace with it, hoping his footsteps aren't too loud. He crouches at the rim of the roof and waits. After a long second there's a soft tread at the end of the aisle; Niska steps into the gap with his snout raised and tongue lolling, tasting the air in great gulps. His suit is hanging on him in ribbons. He's a foot taller and his body bulges strangely. He sniffs and looks up, tilts his head towards Sakari and makes a hideous chainsaw smile.

"Maker," Niska hisses, through the sawtooth waste of his new mouth. "Come down and join me."

Sakari runs.

At first he runs straight, away, with an edge of terror rising in his guts, but then he remembers himself and starts to loop Niska back around the corner of the cargo yard, leaping between the tops of the containers without breaking his stride. Niska follows him from the ground, occasionally crashing against the side of the container walls with a manic roar, pushing at the stacks like he wants to topple them. They rock a little, for all their weight and solidity, which makes Sakari wonder just how fucking strong Niska is now. Better he stays out of reach. He makes another running leap to the next aisle but Niska hits the stack at just the wrong moment, and Sakari stumbles and goes flailing out into space, catching himself and swinging up just in time. Below him, Niska jumps eagerly and swipes at his feet. “Come on!” he calls up. “Come on down, maker! Let’s hunt!” Sakari grunts and heaves himself up, latching a leg over the top and clambering up to stand. He looks down.

“I’m not your maker,” he says. 

“Sure you are!” Niska grins. “Look at me! We’re the same!” He pushes against the stack of containers. “Come down and hunt with me. The world is ours!” What does it say about him, Sakari wonders, dazedly, that he’s been offered this twice. Once by a human serial killer and once by… a were-CEO. 

“Niska,” Sakari says. “This is finished. Do you not see that?” Niska cocks his head, catlike, and stares up. “What are you going to do? Go back to work? The best thing you could do is turn yourself in.”

Niska laughs.

“I have my life back,” he says. “I can’t throw it away.”

“Your life is over,” Sakari says. “You’re a dead man. Believe me.”

“I’m born again,” Niska says. “I’m better and faster and stronger than ever. I don’t need the lab, the grants. I don’t need anything. I’m a god,” he says, and stretches his arms out and charges the stack of containers. They rattle and shudder and then they tip, and on the top of the roof Sakari windmills his arms and leaps too late; the roof falls and he falls with it, rolling down the side of the containers and bounding painfully off the sides. He barely misses getting crushed. He lands hard and rolls away, dragging himself up onto hands and knees. The wrenching nausea in his stomach overtakes him for a second and he retches into the dirt. His limbs tremble. He makes himself get up. “See how I topple the walls!” Niska cries out, from the other side of the mangle container stack. “The foundations of the earth!” 

Sakari’s not sure if this is transformation madness or a more generalized executive megalomania, but either way he’s uninterested in finding out. He slips between the fallen containers and sprints down the next aisle, turning back and zig-zagging now, trying to put a little more distance between them. He goes as silently as he can, listening for Niska’s heavier treads. He turns left and then right, smelling the cold salt of the water as he draws closer. He pauses for a second and scents something else, something like a campfire and dry pine. There’s a rumbling growl from the top of the containers, a flash of motion. Sakari sprints around the turn and Niska pops out of the shadow and slams him in the chest with one huge, hard fist; Sakari’s thrown backwards and he lands on his ass in the dirt. He rolls onto his feet and Niska lumbers over to claw at him. Sakari dodges and slaps his arm away, jabs hard at his throat and connects. Niska gags and spits blood; Sakari kicks him in the stomach and then grabs at his swinging arm and tears into it with his fangs, rips a huge knot of flesh off his forearm. Niska howls in rage. “Stupid little fuck!” he spits, and claws at Sakari’s belly, his face. 

Sakari blocks his heavy strike easily but the claws catch his sleeve and rip through, and Niska takes the advantage to yank him closer, into reach of his own fangs. Niska roars and clamps a row of gigantic teeth into the left side of Sakari’s neck at the shoulder, ripping at the tendons and grinding at the clavicle, digging for the artery. A thousand spikes of hard lightning hit him at once. For a second Sakari leaves his body totally; he hears himself screaming. Blood soaks his clothes, makes them both slippery. He struggles desperately and tears at Niska with his free hand, kicks his legs and stomps onto his instep, bites Niska’s clamping arm with his own fangs to strip flesh from bone. But Niska just grips him harder, chews at him ferociously, and Sakari cries out again, feeling himself weakening. The poisoned blood is simmering in his veins like hot vinegar. He thrashes and strikes out again and Niska spits him out, lets him drop. Sakari crawls in a daze away from him, one arm dangling lower than the other. His whole left side is a gripping agony of pain. He can’t lift his left arm or keep his head up. “I’m going to eat you,” Niska says, panting. Thick black blood is running down his arm from the places where Sakari ripped him open. He staggers forward. There’s a silvery piece of sinew caught between his teeth. “And then I’m going to—”

A flash over their heads and something makes a flying leap into Niska; a body hits him and they go crashing down onto the ground together in a tangle of arms and legs and teeth. Sakari blinks and watches Chloe rear up to slash her clawed hand across Niska’s throat. Blood sprays her face. 

“Murderer!” she screams. Niska makes an awful choked sound and throws her off; she rolls and springs again and knocks him around his middle, shoving him onto his hands. Chloe hammers his spine with joined hands, like she’s bringing a club down onto his back. Niska grunts and bucks and shoves at her, bites at her face. But Chloe grabs the back of his shirt with both hands and slams him down onto the ground and then buries her face in his spine, her own razorteeth chomping hard enough to crack at the bones. Sakari crawls towards them just as Niska is pushing up with one hand, eager to twist her off his back; but Sakari shreds his fangs into Niska’s arm and holds him down with his good hand, wraps a leg around Niska’s shoulder in a vise grip and clamps him down with the weight of his body. Chloe looks up, her face a mask of gore. They look at each other evenly and then Chloe wraps her forearm around Niska’s neck and digs her teeth into the side of his throat and pulls, and pulls, and rips, and Sakari yanks with his arm wrapped around Niska’s and his foot braced hard against Niska’s raging face, and his teeth in his wrist, and then there is a horrible tearing sound and a horrible scream from Niska, and then the tearing sound breaks with a pop and the scream cuts off.

The body split between them sags, and then goes still. 

Chloe lifts her head and pulls her arm away, slowly, from the mess; Sakari slides his fangs back in and lets go and lies back onto the pavement. Chloe is saying something, but he can’t really hear her. His ears pop. His vision is blurring. There is a sky above their heads, soaringly high and depthless, pricked with early stars. It’s like being underwater in the dark. He’s not frightened anymore, he doesn’t think. He feels better. 

“It’s okay,” he says. It sounds garbled, even to him. He feels someone touching his right hand. The other side of his body doesn’t hurt as much anymore; all he can feel is the cold air touching the exposed, savaged meat of him. It’s strange.

He doesn’t think he’s healing.

Someone takes the weight off his legs. Holds something scratchy against the gaping wound in his shoulder. He can feel himself leaking out there, like a drain in a tub. He doesn’t know where vampires go when they die. “Sofia,” he says, just to hold her name in his mouth again, just for a second. It feels round and soft. He smiles around it. He really doesn’t say it enough. He’s too formal with her. But it was never their habit. 

The hands let him go; there’s a rumbling sound like an engine, a skidding tire. A slamming noise that sounds dull to him. And then a high, sweet scent like lilies, clean and dry and sunswept as beach grass. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. He inhales and sinks back onto the ground and listens to the footsteps. He can’t move his arms anymore but he feels strangely safe and unconcerned. It doesn’t matter. Now that she’s here. 

And then he’s gone; carried away by the current, pulled off by the undertow, like a fallen leaf. He doesn’t know what happens next.

When he becomes aware of himself again he becomes aware of her at the same instant; she’s cradling him in her lap in the backseat of a car. His legs are compressed at odd angles and his neck is screaming in pain, making him tremor uncontrollably. His vision is still dim; there’s blood crusted on his face, in his eyes. He struggles to sit up but her forearm is like an iron band around him; she presses him back down against her and says, “Drink,” in a firm voice. She puts a plastic container to his lips and his eyes flicker half-open at the fresh unexpected smell of it. He relaxes and she tilts the quart up and he drinks, gulping it down readily if less than tidily. He can't control his face and neck very well. When he’s emptied it she reaches down and cracks another one, and he drinks that too. She tosses the container out of the open door and he closes his eyes again, settles back into her, the warmth and softness of her. But the pain doesn’t stop. He just lies there and tries to sink into it, ignore it. He’s so weak it’s not much trouble. He can barely stay conscious. There is a dark empty feeling creeping up along his limbs, into his cheeks, like he's going to pass out again. It's too heavy to fight.

“How’s he doing?” Peltola says, after a while, from somewhere that seems far away and muted. Karppi shifts against him. Pulls something away from his neck wound; when it touches the cooler air he hisses in agony. 

“He’s not healing,” she says. “Look at this.”

“It’s Niska,” says Chloe. It takes him a second to remember Chloe is there, too. He didn't hallucinate that. “Niska’s blood is fucked up. It tastes like drugs. I only got a little bit in my mouth, but I feel like shit.”

“It’s more than drugs,” Karppi says, grimly. “He was his own experiment.”

“He’s a vampire, for crying out loud,” Peltola says. “It’s not like he’s going to die.” There’s a tense silence. “Wait, can he?”

“I don’t know,” Chloe says. “When I was in the lab I saw one just… give up. Go dry. They pumped her full of blood but she still looked like a skeleton. And that was it.”

“Should we call an ambulance?” It’s another voice, this one younger and more hesitant. It shocks him out of his stupor. Sakari lifts his head a fraction.

“Henna?” he croaks. Everybody goes still around him. “What… are you doing?”

“I told her to come,” Karppi says, and strokes his hair. “She answered your phone.”

“You’ll kill me,” he says, and sinks back down. 

“What?”

“It’s a joke,” Henna says. “I’m dialing, okay?”

“No,” Karppi says. “I want to try something.” She wriggles a little, starts to pull up her sleeve.

“Hey,” Peltola says. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You have a better one?”

Peltola doesn’t say anything. Nobody does. Karppi slides sideways gently beneath him, a rearranging of her limbs. There's a pause. "A little privacy?" she says, and there's a shuffling of feet outside the car. She presses her forearm to his mouth. “Okay,” she says. “Come on, love. Go ahead.” He doesn’t understand what she’s doing. He kisses the skin pressed to his lips, just a bare little peck, and Karppi laughs softly under him. “No, that’s—come on, baby. I want you to drink. Go ahead. Take a little.” When her words sink in, he reaches up with his functioning hand and shoves weakly at her. Tries to push her arm aside.

“No,” he croaks. Karppi holds him down against her; she’s so much stronger than him right now. Maybe he really is dying, again. For good. 

“I need you to do this,” she says, and presses her bare arm back over his lips; they curl back and then her skin is against his teeth, smooth and clean and smelling of her body, honeyed and irresistible. “Please try. For me.”

"I can’t,” he says, but his resolve is fading. He squeezes his eyes shut in misery. She doesn’t know what she’s asking. Doesn’t know how horrible it is. How much it must hurt. He’d rather die than feed off her like an animal. “You don’t want it.”

“My love,” she says, against his ear. “I do.” Her skin is salt and sugar. Something wet touches his cheek. It’s her cheek. She’s crying. “Please. Please try. Please live,” she whispers. “Please don’t go.”

Has she said those words before? She’s surely thought them. But nobody she’s ever loved has been able to come back for her. Love and shame war in him for an instant, but only an instant, and barely that. He opens his mouth and lets his upper fangs drop, just the two, and presses gently to her wrist. There’s a prick, a tiny puncture, and then his teeth slide into the flesh of her arm. Karppi inhales against him, her chest lifting his, as if they’re both breathing. 

Her body’s so alive. Her skin against his mouth is soft and firm and her heart is beating a staccato. He keeps as still as he can and a trickle of blood wets his mouth, a pump straight from her heart. His vision goes white, his knees buckle. She tastes like—he doesn’t have the language for it. He feels blinded by it, struck to silence, lifted into the sky. He latches his mouth to her skin and sucks and a wave of pleasure and vertigo washes over him. Bubbles go up his spine, popping like warm champagne. She tastes like joy. She’s inside him, he thinks, with helpless, intoxicated wonder. He’s filled with her, her blood, her perfume. His body is warming to her temperature. He smells something sugared rising in the air, a tang that’s like—oh _Christ_ , he thinks. She’s actually getting wet. From this. He doesn’t understand. Beneath him Karppi’s hips shift; against all odds and the brokenness of his body, his dick stirs in his jeans. “You’re so good,” Karppi murmurs, her breath in his ear, against his cheek. “You’re doing so good.” He sucks and moans around her arm and hardens even further, his cock stiffening and his senses shorted out in every direction. He swallows another mouthful and it’s like liquid gold melting inside him, tingling out in aftershocks of warmth and peace and pleasure to every nerve ending and inch of skin. He’s never felt like this in all his life. He’s floating, but not from the pain: there’s a cloud buoying him up, a softness in his body and a contentment in his mind.

He shuts his eyes and still sees her glowing through the skin of his eyelids, sees—

her in the sunlight, the color of her hair, the way she moves above him, beneath him, around him; the blue of the sky, the red streak of sunrise, yellow sand against his bare skin; the light moving in a window, in a mirror, the slow smile she makes in the morning and the ripple of coffee in the cups, his bare feet against the floor in the bedroom; the hill by the cottage they kept when he was small, day rising over the crest of the pine trees and the shining face of the water, too dazzling to watch for very long; snow on rooftops, white and still, and his bootprints in a line behind him; his hand on her knee and her hand out the passenger window, making waves in the air as the world rolls by, the world—

his fangs slide out and Karppi goes limp underneath him; he licks her skin clean and tears off the bottom of his shirt, wraps it around to cover the two tiny holes. He sits back and scoops her into his arms, checks her pulse hurriedly: it’s strong and regular, if very slightly slow. She’s just fainted. He leans out of the car door.

“Help!” he says, and Peltola and Henna pop out of the other car like two jack-in-the-boxes; they sprint over in a second. “She’s okay,” he says. “I think she’s okay. She’s fainted.” They’re staring at him; Henna leans down to put her fingers against Karppi’s throat, her face anxious, and then stands up, satisfied. “We need to get her to the hospital,” he says. Henna goes around to the other side, to start strapping Karppi’s legs in, but Peltola still doesn’t move. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says, and shakes her head. She opens the driver’s side door and slides in, glances back. “Just, you know. Your shoulder was practically gone.” She starts the car. “Follow us,” she calls to Henna. And then they’re moving. Peltola sticks the blue light on top of the car one-handed while they’re tearing down the access road, and merges them hard into traffic. He keeps Karppi cradled in his arms, holding her through the bumps and jerks. She’s still warm and not especially pale, but he wraps his ruined sweatshirt around her anyway, to keep her warmer.

Somewhere en route he raises a hand to the missing meat of his neck and finds he’s whole again, seamlessly and totally. There’s not even a scratch.

When he was a boy his grandfather lived in Kajaani; they used to drive up every summer from the city and stay for two weeks in his cabin by the water. He spent his tenth birthday there, fulfilling a wish. What he’d wanted was to stay up for the entire day and night that led up to the hour of his birth. It had become a strange superstition for him, somehow. He doesn’t remember why. Or why his parents indulged him. But they had. 

He’d been born at noon, or thereabouts. That day had been hot and clear. His mother had told him the story a few times, how she’d gotten up in the morning and made tea and sat on the balcony and watched the sun rise and known suddenly in her heart that this was the day she was going to meet him, her first and only child. His father had been finishing a business trip but he’d rushed back at her calm, collected telephone call. He’d been a week early. Scrawny but healthy they’d told him, often, and tweaked his ears when they said it. He’d stayed up all night, first by the fireside and then up in his little attic bedroom, staring out the open window. He’d only messed up and dozed a little bit. But then the clouds had rolled in and it had stormed for most of the morning; when it was done the clouds sat heavy and grey as stones in the sky and he’d sat on a stool under the porch and felt miserable about it; cheated, somehow. His mother had fed him a pancake and told him to make the best of it. He’d tried.

And then at a quarter after twelve the wind had rolled in, a warm dry wind from the south, and the clouds had streaked into mist and then dissolved into incandescence; and his exhausted eyes came awake to the lustrous, indomitable sun that was his birthright. He’d gone into the wet grass and leapt and rolled and yelled for joy and ruined his clothes and then fallen asleep on a wicker sofa for five hours straight, missing dinner.

He hasn’t thought about any of that in years and years. Those memories were land mines; digging them up could only hurt. His grandfather had died the next year. And two years after that… but he can picture them in his mind again clearly, and without any more than a tolerable amount of old pain. He can see them like it was yesterday: his father stoking the fire and his grandfather bringing out the tray of hot drinks and hotter fried doughnuts. His mother snapping twigs and tossing them into the flames, one at a time. Telling him to make wishes on them, they were as good as candles. He remembers now that they’d all gone onto the lawn too, after the clouds broke and the sun crawled out; laughing, smiling, to rejoice with him at nothing. He can't believe he forgot that. It was a silly wish; children need their sleep. But they’d let him be the way he was, let him want what he wanted. They were the last people to ever take him just as he came.

Before her.

His case workers had made him go to group therapy for three years, with other kids whose parents were dead or who beat them or drank too much and crashed their cars; he’d spent a lot of time as a young adult making sure he was getting over things, that he was doing something called moving on. That he was functional. Even with the drugs he was functional: a kind of tepidly moderate, self-deluding addict who still showed up to shifts on time. But he’d made a mistake somewhere. He’d started to think that functional was the only thing he needed to be. Oh, it’s not a sob story. He’s been eating in good restaurants and working a job he liked and fucking nice-looking people and buying things; he’s gotten two promotions, gone to Italy four times in the last three years, drunk exceptional wine, hiked around vineyards with the sun on his back and the feeling that life was fine and pleasant and going very well, indeed. But a piece of him had been hiding under the bed this whole time. A boy had laid down that night and awoken to screams, and a part of that boy had never gotten back up again. He’d forgotten to go back for himself: to stretch his arms into the dark and embrace himself, to tell himself that it was okay to get up, that it was safe now to come out. To come back.

He’s woken up. That’s what’s happening. He died, and woke up under the bed again, kicking and afraid. But this time someone reached for him and caught him. Someone who loved him. Which isn’t anything like what happened the first time. It’s changed everything. It’s made something new out of him.

He sits in the gravel courtyard next to the hospital with his elbows on his knees. They keep a little garden there for people to wait in or smoke in, with scrubby evergreen bushes and stone benches. There are pale shoots sticking up here and there; bulbs just poking out of the ground, testing the temperature bravely. They throw a fresh, green scent into the air, even in the dark. It’s just after midnight. He’s got his phone back in his pocket. He couldn’t go inside, looking the way he did, even with Henna’s borrowed hoodie covering up the tears in his shirt and his face wiped off with napkins from the glove compartment. He certainly couldn’t be in there with her when other officers came in to take her and Peltola’s statements. Henna says she’ll come down and get him when it’s okay to come up. Until then he’s just going to wait. His leg is bobbing a little. He’s got more energy than he knows what to do with. Not a manic energy, something stretched and fragile, but a sure feeling that he could run and run and run until dawn and not stop, not even tire. He feels stronger; anchored. Karppi’s blood did something to him, something good. An equal and opposite reaction to Niska’s. More than that, even. He’s been… turned, again. Miraculously. Scrubbed raw and steaming, like running into the snow out of the sauna. He feels—clean.

The automatic doors open and shut with a puff of air; Peltola comes across the sidewalk towards him. He stands up.

“She’s asleep,” she says. “Mild concussion, a little anemic. They gave her some blood and she’s resting. She’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” he says. Relief floods him. His knees only wobble a little. 

“They’re going to keep her for the day, I think,” Peltola says. “You should go home. Henna will be out in a second.”

“Okay,” he repeats. He knows he sounds like an idiot. It’s just that if he says anything else he risks confirming it. He glances at the doors, watching for Henna. "Did you ever find that container?"

"Yeah," Peltola says. "The timing was wild. They picked up the truck—that white truck that rammed us, remember—driving into the back of the port, and just followed them. One guy driving and a second guy pumped full of sedatives and tied up in the back. There was nobody else in the container, but the driver sat there for a while like he was waiting, so who knows." Waiting for us, he thinks. Maybe waiting for him to turn Niska, so they could kill him, and then shove Karppi into a cargo container with a werewolf, to flip a coin and see what would come out. "The guy from the trunk's gone, by the way," Peltola says. "And so's your friend."

"Who?"

"The punky-looking girl with blood all over her face."

"Oh. Chloe." 

"Wait, the sister?" He nods. "Great," Peltola says. "So there's _two_ werewolves running free in Helsinki on a full moon."

"Chloe won't let anything happen," he says. He doesn't think. She was in control as far as he could tell. If she's spirited away another werewolf from under the nose of the police, it's probably to spare somebody real harm. "If she hadn't been there it would be Niska running free tonight."

"Sure," Peltola says. "That's fair." She sighs, like she's thinking about paperwork. He literally can't imagine what she's going to write in her reports. They'll have to be elaborate fantasies or so short they don't actually contain any information. They've got two hired thugs to put up on assault and kidnapping charges, but almost everybody else involved is missing or a shredded corpse. He doesn't envy her right now. “You stopped,” Peltola says, suddenly, cutting into his imaginings. He gives her a confused look. “You stopped yourself. Feeding on her. How’d you do it?”

“I don’t know."

"You don't?"

"I was,” he starts, and trails off. He was full. Full of her, of life. He was real again and whole, practically from the first mouthful. He didn’t need any more of her blood for that to be any more true. He was himself again. More himself than he’s been in ages. He's still not sure why but what he feels now is past doubting. He doesn’t have an answer for Peltola that will make any sense. “I wanted to,” he says instead, which is also correct.

“Huh,” she says.

“You weren’t surprised,” he says. He's been meaning to ask about that. “I mean, seeing me, you were. But the vampire part. It didn't shock you.”

“No,” she admits.

“Karppi said your department tracked one years ago, her and Koskimaki. When they were still partners.” 

“No, before my time here.” 

“Then—”

“My mother’s a witch,” Peltola says. She puts her hands in her pockets. “Lives in Lapland. Lots of older vampires spend the winter up there. Other things, too. Not everybody likes the sun.”

“What,” he says.

Henna comes out of the automatic doors behind Peltola; Peltola shrugs and smiles and turns away to talk to her. His brain feels like it’s been rebooted too hard. A cursor is probably blinking visibly on his face. The two of them talk for a second and then break apart; Henna comes in his direction.

“Can you drive?” Henna says. She tosses him the keys. “I feel like I’m going to drop.” Peltola smiles at them both, makes a little wave and heads for the parking lot on her own, escaping the radius of her own conversational bomb. 

In the car Henna reclines her seat and dozes while he takes them back through the city. It’s quiet and unpopulated except for a few crowds around the outsides of the bars. People are smoking and talking and playing on their phones, most of them only in thin jackets or in no jackets at all. It’s really not winter anymore. 

He parks them in the underground lot and opens Henna’s door for her; she’s so sleepy he has to practically pick her up out of her seat. She leans against the wall while he unlocks the door and then trudges directly to bed without saying anything else. In a few minutes he can hear her faint snoring. He pads around the house and then stops and does a double-take into Emil’s empty room and spins into a full-blown panic for a second. But then he remembers he’s at Noé’s, Henna told him that already: he’s been at Noé’s all night, since yesterday after school, and is fine. It’s Saturday; he’ll sleep late and play videogames. Maybe Henna can pick him up later. Fuck, he thinks, with a hand over his face. How does Karppi keep track of them all? It explains all the times when she hasn’t. He reminds himself to apologize for being a prick about that before.

He strips off his ruined clothes and takes a shower and dresses and then goes to stand on the balcony in his bare feet, drinking a juice glass of over-aerated wine from the fridge and staring out at the moving traffic and the lights dying down one at a time. It’s too bright in the city for stars tonight, but his eyes are sharp enough that they can catch the movement of satellites, and the glowing pink dot of Venus, minute and ageless and secure in her place. He watches the city go to bed slowly and restlessly and turn itself over, until Venus begins to disappear in the coloring sky, and then he pads himself to his own bed and climbs in and falls asleep with his head on her pillow. In his dreams he is lying in the same place, with his arm around her waist and his cheek against the back of her neck; even inside the dream, her heartbeat lulls him to sleep.


	9. Chapter 9

He wakes to soft knocking on the bedroom door. The exhaustion from the last two days hit him all at once when he touched the pillow; he slept so hard and soundly that he doesn’t remember anything at all from the night. He could be waking up on a space station or in his old primary-school gym for all he knows. He rubs his face, sits up. Makes sure he’s decent. He cracks the door. Henna’s up and dressed, with his car keys in her hand.

“I was going to get Emil and go pick up mom,” she says. It’s so strange to hear her call Karppi that, but he tries not to show it on his face. Hopefully she'll say it again in front of Karppi sometime. “They’re letting her out soon. You want to come?”

“What time is it?”

“Just after one.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Give me a second.”

He digs in the closet for an outfit that won’t expose too much skin to the sun, but that also won’t scream ‘hello, I’m hiding my face on purpose, please stop me and ask questions.’ He has a light anorak with a deep hood that’ll have to suffice. He comes out of the bedroom pulling his gloves on. Henna grins at him. 

“Oh, no, don’t worry,” she says. “You’re going to love this.” She holds out an umbrella, one of the huge long-handled kinds that gentlemen carry in old movies.

It’s raining. 

Not just a shower or a mist but a heavy steady drizzle that lays over Helsinki like a woolen blanket, thick and humid and relentless. The clouds are unbroken as far as he can see, streaming grey and shapeless across the entire face of the sky. They’ve blocked the sun, turned the world into a dim living room. It’s strange for this season, which is normally dry or at least dry-ish. But the rain beads on the car windows and floods the wipers and runs along the roof in a pattering rush. Outside it hurtles along the gutters, undammed and insistent, gathering in puddles and washing the street into silver lines, swirling and eddying in the drains in little shining circular whirlpools. It’s wonderful. The world feels calm and muted and close; welcoming, even for him. He gets out of the car in the hospital parking lot, gloves on and umbrella unfurled, but he doesn’t even need the mask or sunglasses. They go through the automatic doors and he drips on the floor mats while Henna gets them all visitor badges. 

It’s strange to be here in the daylight, no matter how weak that daylight currently is. Strange to be among people again. There are just so many. Bustling between rooms and pushing carts down halls; answering phones and bouncing their legs restlessly in the waiting room. There are children running between the aisles and people clicking pens. It’s not like he’s been in total isolation, but the late-night cafes aren’t the same as a busy hospital during business hours. The night owls are usually less restless and busy by nature, and far less numerous. The smell of them all right now is like navigating a forest, a wilderness; the cacophony of their hearts, their lungs, their footsteps, is a whole untuned orchestra. If this is a test, he thinks, he's passing it. There’s a part of him that will probably always be objectively, coldly aware that human beings taste extremely good. The rest of him hates the very idea, but he can’t deny the knowledge of his senses. Regardless, though, coming here has only proven that he doesn't have any real interest whatsoever in eating anybody. The people around him all just feel like… people. He feels surprisingly like a person too, standing here among them, absorbed into their mundane flow. Maybe he's not much of a vampire. Or maybe the old stories are wrong. Maybe the only other vampire he's met was just an asshole. “Hey,” Emil says, and pokes his elbow. Brings him back to himself. “Can I get some chips?”

“Sure,” he says. He gives Emil a couple of coins. Thinks about it, hands over a little more. “Get something for Henna and your mom too.”

They go up into the elevator with armfuls of cheap snacks; Henna and Emil keep nudging each other and trying to make the other drop a packet. They’re grinning. The hall outside of Karppi’s room, like all the rest of the hospital, has been scrubbed within an inch of its life. But it doesn’t matter. When the double doors open at her floor he catches her scent anyway, stronger than anything else, tugging at him just as clearly and distinctly as if her fingers were in his belt loops. 

The kids go in first; he listens to the happy noises they all make at each other, the crinkling sound of them dropping all the little snack bags into her lap, like proud cubs who’ve been out hunting on their own. He follows them in and watches them quietly: Emil’s fair head lowered against his mother, uncomplaining about the arm she’s wrapping around his neck; Henna an awkward pillar at the bedside, only the hand curled around Karppi’s giving her away. Karppi looks well. Rested and with pink back in her cheeks. Her IV has already been taken out, in anticipation of her being discharged shortly; a nurse has bandaged the back of her hand. There’s just a little pulse oximeter on her fingertip. After a minute her gaze lifts to him in the doorway and their eyes meet, and fire licks at him, sudden and consuming; both a campfire warmth, comforting and protective, and one infinitely stronger and wilder, like a solitary flare cutting straight up into the dark. Karppi lays her cheek on Emil’s head and smiles up at Henna, but he feels her heart briefly racing, smells her scent ripening. If his heart still worked it would be fluttering. 

They don't need words to say they're grateful to see each other like this, grateful that they both survived. If she changed her mind, if she didn't like him feeding from her last night, he can't see anything about it in her eyes.

Emil sprawls out and recounts his sleepover and his recent accomplishments in Minecraft for them in excruciating detail while Henna sits at the foot of the bed and shares knowing smiles with Karppi; he smiles himself, seeing them together. For once Henna is on the inside of things, brought closer into the circle, and it’s done something good for the two of them, he can tell. It makes sense. If what Henna wants is to be seen as an adult, to be seen as independent, then Karppi trusting her in the middle of the night for life-or-death help was bound to be an ego-boost. 

Henna's showed him up, he thinks. He'd given her his number, told her to call if she needed him, but he'd failed her. The problem was that it hadn't meant enough to him at the time. He sees that now. There'd been real concern in it; a teenager with a dead parent sleepwalking their way into addiction wasn't abstract to him. He'd hoped he wasn't right. But he hadn’t been thinking of Henna enough, for her own sake. He’d been thinking more about proving something to Karppi; that she wasn't so infallible as she acted, maybe. Or that he wasn't so callous and self-centered as he feared. Or something else he hadn't been ready to admit. In the end all it had proven for certain was that Karppi and Henna both knew how to forgive.

Karppi picks at the nacho-flavored chips and laughs at Emil’s stories, but every now and then her eyes dart up to Sakari’s and hold him for a minute like amber; there’s something in her expression he can’t puzzle out. But he’s content to wonder at it later. He doesn’t need or want anything right now. He has it already. And for once he isn’t wondering whether or not he belongs there with all of them, what role he’s meant to play, if any; the way they’re throwing crisp packets at him is probably meaningful and good.

“I didn’t yet,” Henna is saying, something about a course enrollment. 

“It’s really easy,” Karppi says. “They told me you can do it on a phone.”

“I don’t… actually have a phone anymore. I lost it.”

“What?” Karppi says. “I thought… wait." She looks between them, eyes curious. “Is that why you had his phone yesterday?”

“No, actually,” he starts to say, but Henna cuts in over him.

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why.” She smiles at him just a little, crookedly. It’s mystifying, that she would cover for him. He’s too surprised to contradict her. “Dunno where it is now.”

“Be more careful,” Karppi says. But she leans her head back on the pillows and reaches for Henna’s hand again, holds it tightly. “I’ll get you a new one,” she says. “Do you need it right away?”

“I mean,” Henna says, shyly, “that would be nice.” Karppi sits up, makes like she’s going to get out of the bed. “Hey, not right this second, crazy woman.”

“My wallet’s in my pants,” Karppi says. She gestures at the plastic bag in the cubby, on the other side of the room. “Or my coat. Somewhere. Henna, you can take my card.” Henna shrugs and goes and rummages around in the bag. Sakari would stop her, take responsibility for the cost himself, but then again it's his money in the accounts now too, so it's kind of the same thing. He'll tell Karppi the truth about it later. Emil opens a bag of cheese puffs and goes wandering in a circle through the unoccupied other half of the room. Karppi turns her gaze back to Sakari. It’s a long thoughtful look, running up and over him like examining hands; her eyes are asking him something that he doesn’t quite have the answer to. “How are you feeling,” she says, like he’s the one in the hospital bed.

“Good,” he says, mildly. The corner of Karppi’s mouth quirks up. 

“Just good?” she says. There’s a challenge in her voice, something low and teasing.

“Is there something else I should feel?” he says. He gives her a considering look back and Karppi’s pulse quickens again, for some private reason that he wishes he could decipher.

“This card?” Henna says, and holds one up.

“That one’s fine,” Karppi says, distractedly. Her eyes are still on him. His own nonexistent pulse is seriously considering restarting. When he glances up Henna is watching the two of them with a bemused expression. 

“You know what,” Henna says. “I think I saw a mobile store down the street.”

“Oh?” he and Karppi say, at almost the same time. They very much do not look at each other after that.

“Yeah,” Henna smirks. She’s going to own them from now on, he thinks. “Emil, you want to go for a walk?”

“No,” he says.

“You want to go for a walk and get frozen yogurt from the cafeteria?”

“Yes!” He bounces off the other bed and streaks for the door.

“Hey,” Karppi says, pouting. “Give me a kiss?”

“Noo,” Emil says, but then he does it anyway, sweetly, one for each cheek. Karppi beams at him and nods at Henna and then they blow out of the room like a brisk wind, leaving quiet behind them. 

Karppi looks at him. She pats the bed. He was giving them space, but now there’s no need; he sits beside her and she stretches her hand to clasp around his thigh. The casual possessiveness in it makes him ache.

“You’re really okay?” she says, and now real worry is leaking into her voice. He pulls his collar aside so she can see the smooth, unmarked flesh of his neck and shoulder for herself. Karppi reaches up and strokes along his neck and he closes his eyes for a second at her touch. “It looks fine. You didn’t take much blood.”

“I didn’t need much,” he says. “Your blood was… stronger. I healed before I even let go.” He slides a hand under her arm and turns her wrist; the pinpricks from his teeth are gone. He wonders what that means, that she’s healed too. “I don’t know how,” he says, and picks up her wrist to kiss it. “Maybe you’re magic.”

“You don’t know?” she murmurs. “I do.”

He looks at her, parted lips and luminous eyes, and the itchy antiseptic smell of the hospital falls away and all he can smell is her clean warm body under the linen, the light musk of her natural skin, and now something else more pungent and appetizing unfurling from her—ah, that explains the look she's been giving him. Karppi pulls him closer by the front of his jacket and then they’re kissing, open-mouthed and slow; he braces a hand next to her head and leans over her, presses into her body and shudders when she slides a hand under his belt, skimming down the front of his pants. “Did you,” she asks, between gasping kisses, “last night, when we—could you tell—”

“Yes,” he says. He takes her questing hand and slides it down his front, where he’s already straining in his jeans. Karppi groans in the back of her throat. “God, you taste like sunlight. You taste like heaven,” he says, helplessly. “I—”

There’s a noise from the hallway, like a cart wheel skidding. They look at each other, guilty and disheveled but still turned on, inexplicably and electrifyingly keyed up; her hand hasn't let go of his belt. His eyes slide over to the open door of the little attached bathroom.

“It locks,” Karppi whispers.

He plucks the oxygen meter off her finger and she throws the covers off and they scurry across the floor to the bathroom, kissing as they go like fools; Karppi yelps softly in her thin hospital socks at the cold of the floor and he picks her up and carries her the last few steps and pushes the heavy door closed with a foot; he hefts her up higher and her legs go up around his waist. There's only cotton underwear beneath her hospital gown. He kneads the undersides of her perfect ass, her strong thighs tight around him. He backs them into the wall and Karppi writhes in his arms; he pushes his clothed cock against her center and they both gasp at the contact. She fumbles with his zipper and then he's cupped in her stroking hand. “Love,” she says, “oh love, in me,” and he tugs her underwear aside and thrusts up, inside her and both of them quake and shudder and—come. Literally. It’s like a jolt from a light socket rising from his knees to his scalp, blowing the lid of his head off. She feels it too: Karppi cries out and clenches and grabs at his back, her spine arching; he shoots and shivers and then they slide down the wall a fraction and look at each other dizzily. He's never felt anything like that in his entire life: it was like she touched her fingers to his heart and a rocket at once. 

Maybe it's the blood, he thinks, dazed and vulnerable. She's still coursing though his veins. Maybe it really is magic, not a spell or an incantation but real magic, monstrous wild magic, of the kind that made him. He's awed at the strangeness of it, but not afraid. Karppi rocks against him gently; there are little quivers in her thighs. 

After a second of mirroring her silent, stunned expression he realizes that he's still completely hard inside her. Karppi realizes it too; she pulls his mouth to hers and grinds harder against him. He leans them forward against the wall again, bracing so he can push into her. They fuck fast and silently, desperately; he lifts her just slightly off him, and then brings her down again, sinking back inside. He does it again and again; this is a better use for his new strength than anything else he’s tried. “Oh God, oh,” she says in little panting breaths, moving up and down on his cock, her hands fisted in his short hair; she’s so close to the edge he can feel every tremor inside her. “Show me,” she says. He doesn’t understand. Karppi strokes his face, his mouth; he kisses her fingers. “Show me,” she says. He meets her eyes; she really means it.

Sakari lets his fangs pop and his ridges rise and her scent blooms, soaking and impossibly fragrant, and he fucks her harder, searchingly, like he’s trying to reach something neither of them can see. Karppi kisses his face, kisses his cheek, his ridges; she kisses his lips over the fangs and he jerks inside her. Her blood is in him and their come is wet on the inside of their thighs and they’re connected in every possible way, joined together like a weld, a knot, entwined. He runs his teeth along her throat, not breaking the soft skin there, and she comes again with a held-in cry and he presses her into the wall and buries himself in her and follows. He rests his head on her shoulder and pulls out and his fangs recede. They’re both shaking. 

"Are you okay?" he says; she's collapsed against him. He's still holding her up with both hands. Coming back to reality is like a dash of cold water: he doesn't know what he was thinking, getting her to exert herself. She just spent the night under observation, for fuck's sake. But Karppi lifts her head and he realizes she's not trembling from strain: she's trying to hold in giggles. She's fine, and somehow laughing at him. Of course.

"I can't believe," she says, and puts a hand to her twitching mouth. "We fucked in a hospital.” He stares at her, incredulously. She smacks his chest. "It's not even a little funny?" It is. He tries not to smile and fails and hides the evidence in a kiss. He sets her down and she tucks her hair behind her ears, innocently. “You started it.” He raises his eyebrows. "You came in, looking at me—"

"You were looking at me."

"I was not."

"No?" he says. He leans in again, cups her ass in his hands. God, she's so warm and good to hold that she sometimes turns his higher brain functions off; he's just a lizard, basking in her. She squirms at his cold fingers but holds onto his arms, tight. "You weren't?"

"I might have," she says. 

Karppi comes home and spends the rest of the day in a pile on the sofa with her kids, watching whatever movies they pick and eating takeout french fries.

“You need iron,” he says. He’s making a grocery list. “Do you like spinach?” Karppi looks at him. “Okay. Will you _eat_ spinach?” She thinks about it.

“With a lot of garlic?”

“All the garlic in the world, if that’s what it takes,” he mutters.

She's both sleepy and restless at bedtime, from having laid in a hospital bed or on the sofa all day; when Emil's in bed and Henna's absorbed in her new enormously-screened phone they go out for a walk along the water, slow and ambling. For a long time they don't bother talking. Every now and then she looks at him, or he at her, and their eyes connect. It says enough. They lean against the rail and watch the tide lap against the concrete break. It’s too dark to see across the water very far so it’s as if the waves come in from nowhere, from an invisible place out of sight, invented again and again from nothing; born in the moment that they rise and returning again to shadow in the space of a breath. 

He wants to ask her something, but maybe it’s better that he doesn’t. Maybe he shouldn’t push his luck.

“I’m on leave again,” she sighs. He turns his head to her. “Just a couple of days.” He gives her a commiserating frown. It’s taken him this long to realize she’s not really a workaholic; if she was a typical égoïste or a ladder-climber like he used to be, she would have taken Koskimaki up on his offer last year. It’s just that peeling situations apart and poking their insides is all she actually wants to do. She is a searching, restless woman. She could have been a journalist or a scientist, maybe. A writer, obsessively cataloguing the details in people and reconstructing them into fantasies with false names. She would want the truth from life no matter where she had to look for it. “We should go somewhere,” she says, eventually. “This summer. A vacation. I haven’t taken a real one in a long time.”

“We could get a cottage.”

“What about Italy?” she says. “You always talk about it.”

For a second he feels like he’s swallowing against a stone. His memories of traveling are sun-kissed, bound up in warm days and bright water. At first it feels like he’d have to walk over his own grave to revisit that place. But he thinks about it. The piazzas in Genoa are just as beautiful at night. White limestone becomes moonlike and remote. He pictures himself walking hand-in-hand with her along the _caruggi_ at twilight, winding between the walls, following the smell of flour and woodsmoke and the sweetly mournful sound of distant music. A cliche, maybe, but there are good reasons for that.

“Yeah,” he says. “You’d like it.”

“It’d be good for Emil and Henna to go somewhere really different,” she says. “The furthest they’ve been is Amsterdam.”

Oh, right, he thinks, and makes a couple of quick mental adjustments.

“They’ll love it,” he says. 

“Would that bother you?” Karppi says. She’s caught his expression; her own face goes pensive. “Going all together?” He’s suddenly not sure how to answer. He just lets her keep going. “I don’t know how to do this. When I started with Jussi I always told him he could bring Henna with us, anywhere. And I loved her, I never minded. But sometimes,” she says, and trails away.

“It doesn’t bother me,” he says. He tugs her closer, arm around her waist. “But I know what you mean.”

“Mm,” she says, pleased. “Just… tell me, if something’s too much, okay?”

“Okay.”

Strange to think it could happen, just like this, he thinks. That a woman like this could bring him into her life so fully, that he would want her to. But lately he craves all kinds of things he never wanted before; human blood might actually be the least unexpected one.

Peltola calls him the day before Karppi's due back. Asks if they can meet up after dark. He's surprised but glad for the excuse to go out and talk to somebody who isn't making him a drink. But it's a less pleasant conversation than he might have hoped.

"They've refocused on Henna," she says. "They were tracking somebody else from the ferry, too, but it went nowhere. The footage and traffic stop are enough for a distribution charge. They’ll move on a warrant in the next few days."

"Fuck," he says, and sits forward. "Can you—"

"Don't ask me to do something you wouldn't have done," Peltola interrupts, evenly. They look at each other for a long minute. It's fair, he thinks. He doesn't have to like it, but he can't ask more of her. If none of this had happened he might have brought Henna in himself.

"You should tell Karppi," he says. “Not me.”

"Yeah," she sighs. "Yeah, I will." She blows across the top of her coffee. "She's going to hate my guts." He shakes his head, but at the same time he thinks, _better you than me_. It's an ungenerous thought, but he's glad it's not up to him. He doesn't have to assess Henna's guilt, toss her into the system with his own conflicted hands: he can just be concerned for her, do what he can to support her and Karppi. He can start right now, in fact.

"I should go," he says, and sets his cup back onto the saucer. He's finished, anyway. His eagerness to catch up has cooled, now that he knows this is all she wanted from him. "Give her a call tonight,” he says, rising out of his seat. “She'll still be up."

"Wait," she says. “There’s something else.” The look on her face is enough to make him pause. He stands awkwardly for a second and then sits back down. “I mentioned my mother before. That she’s in an… unusual line of work.” That’s an understatement, he thinks, but doesn’t interrupt. “She has a friend in Muuruvesi who’s having some trouble with an... infestation. And considering your situation, I wondered if you might be able to look into it.”

“My situation?” His eyebrows lift. 

“Let me explain.” Peltola rubs her temple. “Here’s how I see it. You have two qualifications that would come in handy here. One’s that you were a detective. You’ve got those skills. And the other is that,” she says, and glances around, lowers her voice slightly. “The other is that you’d be able to smell a _näkki_ out at a hundred paces.”

For a second he thinks she’s misspoken.

“Peltola,” he says. “Please tell me you’re not serious.”

“I am completely serious.”

“They’re… those are folktales.”

“So are you.” She shrugs. “Give me a break. You can believe in… Chloe,” she says, in a meaningful tone, “but not this?” She has a perfectly good, if ludicrous and infuriating point. He shuts his eyes for a second, hoping to find reality somewhere on the backs of his eyelids. 

“Can your mother… isn’t she qualified to deal with it?”

“She’s eighty-four,” Peltola says. “It involves tramping around the marshes at night. I told her I’d try to handle it, but then you came along, and I thought I could at least put it to you. I haven’t exactly been in this position before, you know. Being able to ask someone of your… specific abilities for help. They're not famous for being easy to negotiate with.” She sets her mug down. “There’d be payment in it. Those things have been making life very difficult for the town.”

He thinks about it. As job offers go, it might be the best one he’s going to get. 

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

“Really?”

“I still feel like this is a prank somehow.”

“It’s not,” she says. “I’ll send you an email with the address and everything you need. How soon do you think you could be up there?”

“I don’t know,” he says. He gives her a flat look. “When are you arresting my partner's daughter?”

Peltola sits back in her chair and sighs.

“It’s complicated, isn’t it,” she says. “Other people’s kids. My ex-wife’s daughter never calls me anymore.” He doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s seen the photo of the girl on her desk: a smiling preteen in front of a boat dock. He wonders suddenly if it would hurt, Emil and Henna cutting him off. He’s afraid it would. Peltola gives him a sad smile. “If she comes in herself it’ll look better,” she says. “Prosecutors like that kind of thing.” He knows. But he appreciates the gesture of her saying it. It’s something.

He walks home, thinking. When he gets home Karppi and Henna look up from the sofa with reddened, anxious eyes, and retreat to Henna's bedroom. Peltola was as good as her word. She must have called as soon as he left. He's just had a coffee but he makes himself busy with the espresso machine anyway, to cover the sound of their heart-to-heart happening only a wall away; what mother and child have to say to each other in the extremities of their fear and despair is none of his business. Karppi comes to bed late and curls into him. Tells him as much as he needs to know. It takes her a long time to fall asleep.

Maybe caffeine does still affect him somehow, with or without a normal human digestive system, or maybe he's sharing Karppi's anxiety; either way he's awake and reading at quarter to seven when Henna's door creaks softly open. She pads out dressed, with her knapsack in hand. For a moment he wonders if she's actually going to run, but then he sees her face, and feels ogreish for having wondered. Henna's haunted eyes track him as he gets up and starts to move around the kitchen.

"Here," he says. He hands her a banana. "I'll make breakfast."

"I'm not hungry."

"You will be," he says. So Henna sits. She seems too tired to argue. He works quietly, hoping not to raise the rest of the flat. He makes her pancakes, the fancier kind his mother used to whip up on weekends, topped with jam. Henna eats slowly and then quickly, and with sudden hungry relish. When she's almost cleared her plate she finally looks up.

"These are really good," she says. There's one more pancake left browning in the skillet; he slides it on top of her plate and she finishes that too. He makes them both a mug of coffee and then stands against the counter, watching her sip her drink with a lowered gaze. "She doesn't make pancakes like this," Henna says. "I don't think she ever learned." 

"My mother taught me."

"Yeah," she says. "But her mother was kind of a bitch. I don’t think she ever liked me.” He puts the dishes in the sink and Henna stares in the middle distance. “I didn’t mean to,” she says, eventually. It’s like the words have been forcing their way out this whole time, for hours or days or weeks; getting them finally into the air makes her face look mildly nauseous. “I didn’t. I'd… I was never so afraid in my—”

“Henna,” he says, firmly, and her eyes snap back up to him. “Don’t.” Her mouth shuts. She sits in silence, surprised; startled and wary, like she doesn’t understand his reluctance to her honesty. He can’t imagine what that honesty is costing her right now. He’s sorry to reject it. "You told Karppi about it, right? You told her everything?" She nods, mutely. "What did she say?"

"To... never tell anyone."

"She meant it," he says. "Not even me, Henna. Listen. They have you on a drug charge. You understand? They have the security tapes. They have you on distribution. And that’s it. That’s all they have. No matter what else they tell you. Look at me and tell me you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Good,” he says. “Okay.”

She can’t break, even for him. He can’t hear her confession. And it’s not his to command, or to absolve. It’s already tearing him at the seams to think about what might have been; what would have happened if he was still alive and things were normal and Karppi had hidden this from him. It would have cracked him in half. He’s not bound to the same duty now. If he was, he’d surely be facing the same as Henna, several times over. But it's bigger than just his old job: he's no longer certain he has the same feelings about right and wrong, about what constitutes justice. All he can think about is Chloe, tearing into the throat of a killer that the law couldn't touch. About Karppi dragging his body down to the basement, chaining him up, and sitting beside him all night. Lying there in the empty silence by herself, praying that when he woke up she wouldn't have to put a man she loved down like a dog. For her own sake she probably should have. But for his, for Henna's, Karppi was capable of sitting alone in the dark as long as she needed to. He would have held it against her once, her paradoxical capacity for lawlessness, her loyalty to the work itself paired with her disdain for the job and its systems. But instead he finally understands. It's another, older law she honors. And he is trying to honor her.

“I should get going,” Henna says. He looks at the clock.

“The lawyer won't be there until nine," he says. "You have time." Henna's face goes even bleaker. He understands; it's horrible to wait, no matter what's ahead. "She'll drive you in."

He washes the dishes and puts them away. Henna watches in silence.

"What were your parents like?" she says, after a little while. He thinks about it. He knows what he used to say about them when people asked, which was rarely: that they were aid workers, that they were good people, that they were dead. Right now it doesn't feel adequate.

"They worked hard," he says. "They were always trying to fix something. They wanted more children, I think. But I was it." He shrugs. "They were like that. They made do with things."

"Huh," Henna says, like that makes sense to her. He's not sure how it would. He's not sure he has much of his parents left in him, but maybe he just can't see which parts are theirs anymore. "My father was funny," she says. "He tried to be. His jokes were really bad but they'd make you laugh anyway. He made you want to laugh." Henna's mouth twists. "He did all the cooking. You probably got that right away."

"I'd never have guessed," he says. But she doesn't smile. Her expression goes watery.

“He’d be ashamed of me,” she whispers. 

He doesn’t know what to say about that, besides to try and deny it for the sake of comfort. He has no idea what kind of man Jussi really was. He was married to Karppi for years; he would have had to be… flexible, about certain things. His wife and children all have a soft-hearted streak, so it’s hard to imagine he didn’t. But he understands her worry. Sakari’s had the same thought before, when he was still using: that if his parents were alive they would have turned their faces away in disgust at the way he treated himself, the way he treated other people. Watching Karppi curl herself even more tightly around Henna, though, makes him feel as if he might have been wrong.

“You think that’s true?” he says, finally. “She isn’t.” Henna looks at his face, hunting for the false note; she doesn’t find it, or it isn’t there. She nods and wipes her eyes a little. He hears padding footsteps from the hall, feels her heart approaching: Karppi comes around the corner of the hallway and sees Henna on the stool, damp-eyed, and comes directly over to wrap her arms around Henna’s neck.

“It’ll be okay,” she says, pressing kisses against Henna’s hair. Henna hangs onto her like a life preserver. He looks away; it’s too much, too private. “It’ll be okay,” she promises. “You’ll be okay.”

Emil wanders in, pulling his sweatshirt on.

“I smell… pancakes?” he says, hopefully. “Did Henna get pancakes? I want some.” 

“It was just toast,” Sakari says. Henna glances at him curiously over Karppi’s shoulder. He smiles at her, and she smiles back. It’s a faint smile, but a real one. “I can make you that if you want.”

“Boring,” says Emil. 

“So, no toast?”

“No, I didn’t say that!” Emil hops onto the stool next to Henna’s. “With egg butter?”

“We’ll see,” Sakari says.

He is trudging his way back to the car in the dark when he smells it, pepper and woodsmoke, and freezes in the middle of the dirt road with his face up to the breeze. The scent’s a warning, like with all her kind, but it’s familiar, too. He comes up the rise and sees Chloe leaning against the car with her arms folded. The sound of frogs and humming insects is all around them, but fainter just where they’re standing, as if they’re being given a wide berth; it’s hard for their kind to pass unnoticed through the natural world. Cities are easy, because people are easy to fool, but try fooling a mosquito.

He clomps up to the car and unbuckles the hip waders, peeling strands of pond scum and weeds off his shoulders and chest. When he shimmies the waders down, a rush of water follows them, soaking the ground at their feet. His jeans and sneakers are probably a total loss. He honestly reeks.

“I thought the whole point of those was to stay dry,” she says.

“Excuse me,” he says, “for getting strangled in a lake.”

There’s a blanket in the back; he wraps it around himself and leans against the car door with Chloe. He’d prefer not to soak the car seats if he can help it. At least it’s a warm night and his clothes won’t get too grossly frigid. He can’t really get cold but he can still get clammy, somehow. 

“A little night fishing?”

“Just business.” His head itches; when he pulls his hand away it’s covered in slimy algae. “Wonderful.”

“You look like shit.”

“Are you here for a reason?” he says. Chloe smirks. 

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m wondering if you want another job.”

“If it’s more näkki, no.”

“But it seems like you have this handled,” she says. “Auntie Fanja said you took care of the one that was eating children. And the rest are already moving on.”

Not one but half a dozen näkki had descended upon the marshes around Muuruvesi; most of them had been content with their usual diet of frogs and wild geese and the occasional larger wild game who wandered into the mud and got dazzled by their hypnotic appeal. But one of them had a taste for wandering children, and had two recent successes under its belt. That one was bigger and more powerful than the others, and found the marshes to be a fine hunting ground. It had no interest in quitting or leaving and had put up a serious fight. The problem was that näkki in their unshifted form were basically _just_ big enough to overpower a hefty primary schooler. As a grown vampire Sakari had relatively little trouble wringing its long green neck and popping its squeaking head off. The rest were especially easy to move along after that. They weren’t predators, except in a normal, animal sense. He’d chased off the last few tonight, although his negotiations had gotten a little carried away. They were playful creatures, inherently mischievous: roughhousing for them was usually all in good fun. Most of their kills were accidents, a consequence of benign but inhuman creatures tangling with their fragile mortal neighbors. He is, after all, weirdly suited for this.

“How do you know Fanja?” She’s a friend of Peltola’s mother, was what he was told. But now it seems she’s a friend of werewolves-at-large, too.

“From around,” Chloe shrugs. “This new job should be… dry, a least.” 

“I’m listening.”

“I have a few lab rats I need moved across the border into Norway. I would do it myself but I’m tied up with a few things.” 

“More of Niska’s?”

“Not all of them, no,” she says. “Niska and Laine weren’t the first people to get interested in werewolves. They won’t be the last.” That’s an upsetting thought, but one he doesn’t have the bandwidth to process right now.

“Where are they headed?”

“There’s a farm up north,” she says. “A safe place. Where they can figure out how to control themselves. It’s the other reason I want you for the job,” she says. “I couldn’t ask a human. Your cargo’s not totally housebroken. I’d trust you to keep them in line.”

“Ah,” he says. “Is that where you went?”

“Yeah.” She tucks her hands in her pockets. “It’s a good place. You almost forget,” she says, and trails off. “I think about that a lot. If I’d just… sent Amelia a postcard or something. So she’d stop worrying about me.” Chloe makes a bitter smile. “It was one of our runners, you know, who died with her,” she says. “She almost found me. I didn’t even know she was looking. I was only thinking about myself.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. Chloe nods. They sit in silence for a while. But he can’t help himself from asking. Karppi will want to know this, too. See what they can do for her family, if she had any living. “Who was she?” 

Chloe rolls her sleeve down. There are two marks on the inside of her arm, like crude mountain peaks in reverse; long triangles that could be arrows, or fangs. They’re a match to the ones he found on the unidentified body. The girl who’d shared Amelia’s fate.

“Her name was Pirta,” Chloe says. “That's all I know. I only met her once. The night she broke me out.” She rolls her sleeve back down. “If you’re in, say so now,” she says. “I don’t have a lot of time to wait.”

“Okay,” he says. 

“Just like that?”

“Give me a break,” he says. “What else do I have going on?” 

“Oh, you’ve got that cute girlfriend,” Chloe says. “I thought maybe she keeps you busy.” She does, in fact. In his downtime he’s been combing through some bank records this week for her and Peltola. But Chloe doesn’t have to know about that.

“You need a ride into town?”

“No,” she says. She stands up, dusts herself off a little. “I’m in the other direction. Plus,” she shrugs. “I like the night.” He grins at that, knowing the feeling, and Chloe grins back. She starts walking. He’s opening the car door and wadding up the soaking blanket when she calls back over her shoulder. “Welcome to the club,” she yells. “Cool monsters only!”

Werewolves, he thinks.

At the motel he takes a long scalding shower which only sort of helps, and then curls up into the too-large bed by himself. It’s just after dawn now; there’s pale light coming in around the curtains. He texts Karppi that he’ll come home tonight and then turns the lamp off, planning to sleep most of the day away, but his phone buzzes on the table. 

“Hey,” he says, surprised that she’s up so early, or so late. 

“Hi,” she says, sleepily. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” he says. “I just smell like wet dog.”

“I thought they were… froggish.”

“They are,” he says. “I don’t know where the fucking smell comes from.” She laughs and he closes his eyes. He can’t really hear her heartbeat over the phone, which leaves him with a strangely disconnected feeling. “Have you talked to Henna?”

“She’s okay,” Karppi says. “She called this morning, she’s settled into her room.”

Henna’s lawyer did a good job of blocking any lines of questioning on Sasha and proving that the smuggling itself only happened under extreme duress; there was no difficulty in establishing genuine fear for her life, considering that Jere’s dead body was found down a well the same week. They had her cold on selling subutex, but the aggravated charges were reduced and she was sentenced to rehab and then six months in prison. The lawyer says for a first offense she could be out in three. It could have been so much worse. The relief he feels is tempered by the knowledge that there are plenty of other kids like Henna who’ve been backed into a corner but who won’t be welcomed home with open arms when they get out. 

“How are you?”

“Lonely,” she says, honestly. He feels the same way. It’s only been a week. His old noncommittal self is laughing at him, but then his old noncommittal self had never slept with her warm thighs pressed into his lap, and didn’t know what he was missing. His old self wasn’t a particularly happy man. But he might be becoming one. Strange to think.

“I’ll drive home tonight,” he says. “Just waiting out the sun.”

“I know,” she says. “Me too.”

The warmth in her voice makes him bold for a second.

“Can I,” he says. “Can I ask you a question?” She makes an affirmative sound. “About my—other face.” 

She’s asked to see it a couple of times since their frantic coupling at the hospital, and not always during sex. He can’t help but be baffled. He’s seen what that face looks like, at least what it looks like to the selfie camera on his phone, and it’s not something he would ever voluntarily regard again. He’s not complaining: he’s not as afraid anymore of hurting her accidentally, and letting his fangs out heightens everything, including sensations. When she touches his fangs or ridges it’s usually all he can do to keep from coming on the spot. But he goes on wondering what exactly she sees in it.

“You mean, why I want to look at it sometimes.” 

“Mm.”

“Because it’s still you,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe it is, to her. She’s always seen things that he couldn’t. “I don’t want him to be a stranger.”

“Oh,” he says. 

He manages, with some effort, to stay in bed and refrain from walking out to the car and driving straight for Helsinki. The noon sun might fry any uncovered edges to a crisp, but he could be in her arms in less than five hours. Instead he says goodnight, good morning, and then turns over and tries to lull himself down with the sweatshirt of hers that he brought smuggled in his duffel. It’s the only thing in the motel that doesn’t smell of cheap industrial soap and old dust and other people. He presses it to his face and sighs and eventually falls asleep.

He gets up and leaves before sunset, wearing the mask and gloves and what he thinks of now as his driving anorak. He tries to take wooded roads as much as he can; the shade they offer is a little easier on the eyes. He’s pulling the car onto the highway exit for metro Helsinki as the sun is dipping down below the horizon. He parks in the back lot and goes up the stairs and when his key goes in he feels her heart drawing closer from the opposite side of the door. She opens the lock for him. “Just in time,” she says. She was, she is, he thinks. Just in time to give him everything, to start his life all over again.

He’s home.

He pulls her into a lingering kiss and Karppi slides her hands under his jacket, clasps her arms around his waist. He noses at her perfect throat and then lifts his head, sniffs the air. 

“Are you making… hot pot?” he says. The flat smells like stew beef and potatoes and underneath that, char. She nods. “Is something burning?”

“Oh fuck,” she says.

He follows her in.

_“You cannot always tell what keeps you confined,  
what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet  
you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls…  
**loving, that is what opens the prison,**  
with supreme power, by some magic force.  
Without these one stays dead.”_

_-Vincent van Gogh to Theo, July 1880_


End file.
